Estimation of total body fat using symbolic regression and evolutionary algorithms

Abstract

Body fat percentage is an increasingly popular alternative to Body Mass Index to measure overweight and obesity, offering a more accurate representation of body composition. In this work, we evaluate three evolutionary computation techniques, Grammatical Evolution, Context-Free Grammar Genetic Programming, and Dynamic Structured Grammatical Evolution, to derive an interpretable mathematical expression to estimate the percentage of body fat that are also accurate. Our primary objective is to obtain a model that balances accuracy with explainability, making it useful for clinical and health applications. We compare the performance of the three variants on a public anthropometric dataset and compare the results obtained with the QLattice framework. Experimental results show that grammatical evolution techniques can obtain competitive results in performance and interpretability.