Extracting time-oriented relationships of nutrients to losing body fat mass using inductive logic programming

This study was performed to extract rules for reducing body fat mass so as to prevent lifestyle-related diseases. Lifestyle-related diseases have been increasing in Japan, even among younger people. Body fat mass is related to lifestyle-related diseases. Hence, finding rules for reducing body fat mass is very meaningful. We obtained lifestyle time-series data on five male subjects who are in their 20s and not obese. The data includes the amount of body fat mass of each subject and a variety of features such as sleep, exercise, and nutrient intake. We used Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to apply this data because ILP can more flexibly learn rules than other machine-learning methods. As a result of applying the data to ILP, our ILP system successfully extracted rules of time-oriented relationships of nutrients to decrease body fat mass based on limited data. Intake of various nutrients one day and two days prior was effective in reducing body fat mass. Moreover, we determined that nutrients related to losing body fat mass include vitamin B2, pantothenic acid, fat, vitamin B1, and biotin.