A Recommender System for Healthy Food Choices: Building a Hybrid Model for Recipe Recommendations using Big Data Sets

Advances in Big Data analytics and machine learning have offered intangible benefits across many areas of one’s health. One such area is a move towards healthier lifestyle choices such as one’s diet. Recommender systems apply techniques that can filter information and narrow that information down based on user preferences or user needs and help users choose what information is relevant. Commonly adopted across e-commerce sites, social networking and entertainment industries, recommender systems can also support nutrition-based health management, offering individuals more food options, not only based on one’s preferred tastes but also on one’s dietary needs and restrictions. This research presents the design, implementation and evaluation of three recommender systems using content-based, collaborative filtering and hybrid recommendation models within the nutrition domain.