Modeling Non-deterministic Human Behaviors in Discrete Food Choices

Andrew Starnes, Anton Dereventsov, E. Susanne Blazek, Folasade Phillips

Abstract: We establish a non-deterministic model that predicts a user's food preferences from their demographic information. Our simulator is based on NHANES dataset and domain expert knowledge in the form of established behavioral studies. Our model can be used to generate an arbitrary amount of synthetic datapoints that are similar in distribution to the original dataset and align with behavioral science expectations. Such a simulator can be used in a variety of machine learning tasks and especially in applications requiring human behavior prediction.