Food Preferences of Students Based on Their Emotional State

Abstract

In this modern progressive world, everyone is suffering from some problem. Many people miss the track of solving their problems and are stuck in a maze. Then they get depressed or stressed over small things. Mostly, Students go through fluctuating moods a lot. In that critical time, everyone wants something that can comfort them. People prefer doing many things like eating, playing games, watching movies when they are not in a pleasurable emotional state. The connection between food and emotions are very intense. As these two things are interconnected, we explored the comfort foods of students in their different states of mind. The earlier researches are based on surveys and psychological questionnaires. In this paper, we proposed a machine learning model of Linear regression and Support Vector Machine with the aid of data science to find out the comfort foods of the students based on their emotional state. The dataset is collected from a publicly available source. The data was collected through a survey at Mercyhurst University. There were 126 students who participated in the survey and over 60 questions were asked. In this study, we tried to find out the comfort foods which students like to have in their different mental state. We performed 2 models, in a Linear regression model, we found 5% accuracy and in SVM we found 95% accuracy which is pretty good.