© 2014 IJIRT | Volume 1 Issue 6 | ISSN: 2349-6002
A SURVEY ON FOOD RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM
USING DATA MINING CONCEPTS
Rimoni Patel, Mitesh Patel
Department of computer engineering, Silver Oak College of Engineering and Technology
Abstract—Studies of general population consuming diets high
in fat particularly saturated fat have shown increased risk of
cancer , diabetes and heart diesease. Worse their diet , more diet-
related diseases people suffer from. Poor diet is the risk factor for
cancer , heart disease ,etc. Significant health benefits can be
achieved at both population and individual level by enabling a
shift towards recommended balanced diet. A recommended
healthy diet can act as a weapon to fight against disease. Data
mining concepts can be applied and used in food
recommendation systems.
Index Terms : Food Recommendation , Recommender System,
Datamining, ID3 ,C4.5
I. INTRODUCTION
A balanced diet is crucial to maintaining one's physical
health, while an unbalanced diet may lead to disease and
sickness. The nutrients that need to be ingested vary greatly
depending on the disease or illness and personalpreferences.
Therefore, how to provide personalized food recommendation
according to different personal requirements and diseases is an
important issue. The measurement of population intakes of
foods and nutrients is central to the science of human nutrition.
At present, patterns of dietary intake are studied on a food-by-
food basis, given that the base units for analysis using food
composition databases are the individual food components of
every meal. Whereas the use of individual foods for the study
of dietary patterns has served us well.The concept of analyzing
food combinations at the meal level is not entirely new. The
examination of food combinations at the meal level provides an
approach to deal with the complexity and unpredictability of
the diet and aims to overcome the limitations of the study of
nutrients and foods in isolation [2].
Data mining is the extraction of hidden predictive
information from large databases; it is a powerful technology
with great potential to help organizations focus on the most
important information in their data warehouses . Data mining
tools predict future trends and behaviors, helps organizations
to make proactive knowledge-driven decisions . A framework
based on different data mining concepts can be used for building
a food recommender system . Application of data mining
techniques to World Wide Web called Web mining can be used
for recommendation system. Web mining aims to discover useful
information and knowledge from the web hyperlink structure,
page contents, and usage data.
Recommendation systems represent an effective solution
for reducing complexity when searching information over the
IJIRT 101119 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN TECHNOLOGY
Internet . The main characteristic of recommender systems is
that they can personalize their interaction to each individual
user. Personalization involves the design of systems able to
infer the needs of each person and then to satisfy those needs.
A recommendation system serves as an information filtering
and customization tool. A food recommender system is an
intermediary program which has a user interface that
automatically and intelligently extract the useful information
of people’s eating habit according to an individual’s needs.
According to different algorithms, concurrent recommendation
systems can be categorized into three categories: content based
filtering (CBF) recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF)
recommendation, and combined recommendation. By using the
data mining algorithms, the information filtering processes can
be performed prior to the actual recommending process so that
system can be improved.
II. DATA MINING TECHNIQUES
There are several major data mining techniques which have
been developed and used including association, classification,
clustering, prediction and sequential patterns. A brief
explanation of such techniques. [1]
Association
Association is one of the best known data mining
technique. In association, a pattern is discovered based on a
relationship of a particular item on other items in the same
transaction. Association searches for relationships between
variables. For example a supermarket might gather data on
customer purchasing habits. Using association, the
supermarket can determine which products are frequently
bought together and use this information for marketing
purposes
Classification
Classification is a classic data mining technique which is
based on machine learning. Classification is used to classify
each item in a set of data into one of predefined set of classes
or groups. Classification method uses mathematical techniques
such as decision trees, linear programming, neural network,
statistics etc. For example, we can apply classification in
application that “given all past records of employees who left
the company, predict which current employees are probably to
leave in the future.” In this case, we divide the employee’s
records into two groups that are “leave” and “stay”. And then
617
 © 2014 IJIRT | Volume 1 Issue 6 | ISSN: 2349-6002
we can ask our data mining software to classify the employees
into each group.
Clustering
Clustering is a data mining technique that makes
meaningful or useful cluster of objects that have similar
characteristic using automatic technique. Different from
classification, clustering technique also defines the classes and
put objects in them, while in classification objects are assigned
into predefined classes. For example in a library, books have a
wide range of topics available. We need to keep those books in
a way that readers can take several books in a specific topic
without hassle. Hence by using clustering we can keep books
that have some kind of similarities in one cluster i.e.in one
shelf and give it a appropriate name. If readers want to grab
books in a particular topic, he or she need only go to that shelf
instead of looking in the whole library.
Prediction
The prediction is one of a data mining techniques that
discovers relationship between independent variables and
relationship between dependent and independent variables.
For instance, prediction analysis technique can be used in sale
to predict profit for the future if we consider sale is an
independent variable, profit could be a dependent variable.
Then based on the historical sale and profit data, we can draw
a fitted regression curve that is used for profit prediction.
Sequential Patterns
Sequential patterns analysis in one of data mining technique
that seeks to discover similar patterns in data transaction over a
business period. The uncover patterns are used for further
business analysis to recognize relationships among data.
III. WEB MINING
Web mining has an aim to extract useful information and
knowledge from the web. The web data mining process can be
described as the five functional modules, namely the data
acquisition, data pre-processing, data mining, analysis and
evaluation and knowledge formulation modules. The functions
of each module are given as under. [8]
A. Data acquisition
In terms of functionality, data acquisition module selectively
obtains data from the outside web environment to provide
material and resources for the latter data mining. The data
source that the web environment provided includes the web
pages data, hyperlinks data and the history data of user
visiting log. This module is composed by three relatively
independent processes which are data search, data selection
and data collection.
IJIRT 101119 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN TECHNOLOGY
B. Data preprocessing
Data preprocessing mainly processes and reconstructs the
source data acquired in data acquisition phase and builds the
data warehouse of related themes to create basic platform for
data mining process. Data preprocessing is preparation for
data mining and it mainly includes data scrubbing, data
integration, data conversion, data reduction, etc.
C. Data mining
Data mining module is the core of the whole system. Data
mining is the process of extracting patterns from data, which is
becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data
into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of
profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud
detection and scientific discovery. Generally speaking, the
ultimate goals of data mining only are description and
prediction, the so-called description is that using a
comprehensible model to express the attributes and
characteristics information contained in the data; and the
prediction is to find the discipline of the attributes according to
their existing data value and then speculate a possible attribute
value in the future. Classical data mining techniques include
classification of users, finding associations between different
product items or customer behavior, and clustering of users
D. Analysis and evaluation
Analysis and evaluation module is to analyze the
credibility and effectiveness of the knowledge model the data
mining obtained, and to reduce evaluated conclusions to
provide information support for the management and decision-
making of users.
E. Knowledge formulation
Knowledge expression module refers to the knowledge
models mined from the web data by using data mining tools,
and it will be shown with appropriate form to facilitate user
acceptance and mutual exchange.
IV. METHODOLOGY
A. Clustering Techniques
Food Recommendation system can make use of clustering
analysis. Clustering analysis is a common technique for
statistical data analysis that used in various fields including
machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining.
Clustering is a method of unsupervised learning which groups
similar objects on the basis of their attributes into a same group
called cluster. The purpose of clustering is to group the objects
based on the principle of maximizing the intraclass similarity
and minimizing the interclass similarity.
618
 © 2014 IJIRT | Volume 1 Issue 6 | ISSN: 2349-6002
There are many clustering algorithms which can be
classified into the following categories: Partitioning methods,
Hierarchical methods, Density-based methods, Grid-based
methods, and Model-based methods. We can use Self-
Organizing Map and K-mean clustering for food clustering
analysis. [ 3]
Self-Organizing Map
The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) or commonly known as
Kohonen network is a type of artificial neural network that is
trained using unsupervised learning for the visualization and
analysis of high-dimensional data purpose. It was invented by a
Finnish professor named Teuvo Kohonen. The SOM composed
of map units called nodes or neurons which are connected to
adjacent neurons by a neighborhood relation. The SOM
algorithm will compute a model, mi, for each node. These
models are the representation of the input space of the training
samples and organized into an n-dimensional ordered map in
which similar models are closer to each other in the grid than
the more dissimilar one.
The SOM training can be considered to be a competitive
learning since when the input vector is presented to the
network, the Euclidean distance to all nodes in the map is
calculated to find the node that gives the smallest distance is
called best matching unit (BMU). Then, the weights of the
BMU and its neighbor are adjusted towards the input vector.
This adjustment process stretches the prototypes of the BMU
and its topological neighbors towards the input vector. The
BMU’s local neighborhood can be determined by using the
neighborhood radius which will shrink with time.
K-mean clustering
K-means clustering is one of the most well known and
commonly used partitioning clustering methods. The k-means
algorithm takes the input parameter, k, and partitions a set of n
objects into non-overlapping k clusters where k<n. This method
aims to minimize the sum of squared distance between an
object to the centroid which is called sum of squared error. The
K-means algorithm proceeds as follows. First is to randomly
select the k centroids from a dataset. The centroid represents
the mean value of all the objects in the cluster. The next step is
to assign the remaining object to the nearest cluster based on
the distance between the object and the cluster mean, which is
the centroid and then calculates the new mean for each cluster.
This process iterates until there is no change of the centroids
values. In other words, until the criterion function is
convergence .
B. Classification techniques
The classification can be described as a supervised learning
algorithm. Data records are belong to class on the bases of
knowledge of class it assign a class labels to data to co- design
and co develop software and hardware, and hence, such
components. However, incorporation of that deal with
IJIRT 101119 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN TECHNOLOGY
knowledge extraction from database records and prediction of
class label from unknown data set of records. We can define
classification is a development in which specified set of data
records is separated into training and test data sets. For
validating the model we required the test data record and for
constructing the classification model training data set is
required. The constructed classification model is used for
classifying and predicting new data set records. These new data
set records are different from training and test data set. For
getting higher classification accuracy or accurate prediction we
required a prior knowledge of the class label data record which
makes attribute selection effortless. For higher classification
accuracy supervised learning algorithm (like classification) is
preferred to unsupervised learning algorithm (like clustering).
A number of widespread classification algorithms used in data
mining and decision support systems is: neural networks,
logistic regression, Decision trees etc. Among these
classification algorithms decision tree algorithms is the most
frequently used because of it is effortless to understand and
cheap to implement .
Decision tree
Decision tree are generally used for gaining information
for the reason of decision -making. Decision tree are
classifiers on a target attribute (or class) in the form of a tree
structure. The observations (or items) to classify are composed
of attributes and their target value. The nodes of the tree can
be: a) decision nodes, in these nodes a single attribute-value is
tested to determine to which branch of the subtree applies. Or
b) leaf nodes which indicate the value of the target attribute.
There are many algorithms for decision tree induction: Hunts
Algorithm, CART, ID3, C4.5, SLIQ, and SPRINT to mention
the most common. Decision tree induction stops once all
observations belong to the same class (or the same range in
the case of continuous attributes). This implies that the
impurity of the leaf nodes is zero. For practical reasons,
however, most decision trees implementations use pruning by
which a node is no further split if its impurity measure or the
number of observations in the node are below a certain
threshold. The most frequently used decision tree algorithms
are ID3, C4.5 and CART.
The main advantages of building a classifier using a decision
tree is that it is inexpensive to construct and it is extremely
fast at classifying unknown instances. Another appreciated
aspect of decision tree is that they can be used to produce a set
of rules that are easy to interpret while maintaining an
accuracy comparable to other basic classification techniques.
1. ID3 (Iterative Dichotomiser 3)
This is a decision tree algorithm introduced in 1986 by
Quinlan Ross. It is based on Hunts algorithm. The tree is
constructed in two phases. The two phases are tree building
and pruning. ID3 uses information gain measure to choose the
splitting attribute. It only accepts categorical attributes in
619
 © 2014 IJIRT | Volume 1 Issue 6 | ISSN: 2349-6002
building a tree model. It does not give accurate result when
there is noise. To remove the noise pre-processing technique
has to be used.
To build decision tree, information gain is calculated for each
and every attribute and select the attribute with the highest
information gain to designate as a root node. Label the
attribute as a root node and the possible values of the attribute
are represented as arcs. Then all possible outcome instances
are tested to check whether they are falling under the same
class or not. If all the instances are falling under the same
class, the node is represented with single class name,
otherwise choose the splitting attribute to classify the
instances. ID3 does not support pruning.ID3 does not deal
with continuous ,numeric data. It uses training data sets to
make decisions. Any adulteration of training data will result in
wrong classification.
2. C4.5
This algorithm is a successor to ID3 developed by Quinlan
Ross . It is also based on Hunt’s algorithm.C4.5 handles both
categorical and continuous attributes to build a decision tree.
In order to handle continuous attributes, C4.5 splits the
attribute values into two partitions based on the selected
threshold such that all the values above the threshold as one
child and the remaining as another child. It also handles
missing attribute values. C4.5 uses Gain Ratio as an attribute
selection measure to build a decision tree. It removes the
biasness of information gain when there are many outcome
values of an attribute.
At first, calculate the gain ratio of each attribute. The root
node will be the attribute whose gain ratio is maximum. C4.5
uses pessimistic pruning to remove unnecessary branches in
the decision tree to improve the accuracy of classification.
C4.5 builds decision trees from a set of training data in the
same way as ID3, using the concept of information entropy.
At each node of the tree, C4.5 chooses the attribute of the data
that most effectively splits its set of samples into subsets
enriched in one class or the other. The splitting criterion is the
normalized information gain (difference in entropy). The
attribute with the highest normalized information gain is
chosen to make the decision. The C4.5 algorithm then recurs
on the smaller sublists.
ANN(Artificial neural networks)
ANN can be used to predict the dietary quality
HEI(healthy eating index) based on dietary intake i.e. using
foods consumed together in meals or using meals consumed
together over survey[2]. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN)
is an assembly of inter-connected nodes and weighted links
that is inspired in the architecture of the biological brain.
Nodes in an ANN are called neurons as an analogy with
biological neurons. These simple functional units are
composed into networks that have the ability to learn a
classification problem after they are trained with sufficient
data. The simplest case of an ANN is the perceptron model.
IJIRT 101119 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN TECHNOLOGY
The perceptron model is a linear classifier that has a simple
and efficient learning algorithm. An ANN can have any
number of layers. Layers in an ANN are classified into three
types: input, hidden, and output. Units in the input layer
respond to data that is fed into the network. Hidden units
receive the weighted output from the input units. And the
output units respond to the weighted output from the hidden
units and generate the final output of the network. .The main
advantages of ANN are that – depending on the activation
function– they can perform non-linear classification tasks, and
that, due to their parallel nature, they can be efficient and even
operate if part of the network fails. The main disadvantage is
that it is hard to come up with the ideal network topology for a
given problem and once the topology is decided this will act
as a lower bound for the classification error.
CONCLUSION
Food recommendation system can make use of several data
mining techniques such as clustering, classification. Survey
contain study of clustering techniques such as k-mean and
self-organizing map used as a methodology and also
classification techniques such as decision tree . ANN can also
be used for analysis of patterns.Decision tree algorithms such
as ID3 and C4.5 can be used in food recommendation systems.
REFERENCES
[1] Sita Gupta, Vinod Todwal,’ Web Data Mining &
Applications’ International Journal of Engineering and
Advanced Technology (IJEAT) , February 2012.
[2]Aine P Hearty and Michael J Gibney ,’Analysis of meal
patterns with the use of supervised data mining techniques—
artificial neural networks and decision trees’ Am J Clin Nutr
2008;88:1632– 42. Printed in USA. © 2008 American Society
for Nutrition.
[3]Maiyaporn Phanich, Phathrajarin Pholkul, and Suphakant
Phimoltares’ Food Recommendation System Using Clustering
Analysis for Diabetic Patients’IEEE 2010.
[4] Choochart Haruechaiyasak , Klong Luang, Pathumthani,
Mei -Ling Shy, Shu-Ching Chen ‘A Data Mining Framework
for Building A Web-Page Recommender System’.
[5] Wei Peng, Juhua Chen and Haiping Zhou ‘ An
Implementation of ID3 --- Decision Tree Learning Algorithm’
[6] Abdullah A. Aljumah, Mohammed Gulam Ahamad,
Mohammad Khubeb Siddiqui ,’ Application of data mining:
Diabetes health care in young and old patients, Journal of
King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences
(2013) 25, 127–136.
620
 © 2014 IJIRT | Volume 1 Issue 6 | ISSN: 2349-6002
[7] Shilpa Dharkar, Anand Rajavat ,” Performance Analysis
of Healthy Diet Recommendation System using Web Data
Mining” , International Journal of Scientific & Engineering
Research Volume 3, Issue 5, May-2012.

[8] Xiaocheng Li, Xinliu, Zengjie Zhang, Yongming Xia,

Songrong Qian, “Design of Healthy Eating System based on
Web Data Mining”, International Conference on Information
Engineering,2011Web Data Mining”, International
Conference on Information Engineering,2011.

IJIRT 101119 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN TECHNOLOGY 621