The BMI and Mental Illness Nexus: A Machine Learning Approach

In this paper, we reveal the correlation between two seemingly unrelated topics which is BMI and Mental Illness using a Machine Learning approach. Body mass plays an important part for mental illness e.g., Depression and anxiety .It deals with a person's mass and height. A person's weight has a drastic effect on their lifestyle and health. Large valued BMI's are linked to all kinds of diseases ranging from diabetes to heart disease. Mental disorders and obesity are chronic conditions which need attention and care. This paper compares the relationship BMI has to mental diseases. We have used Machine learning algorithm to solve the problem concerned. To find the relationship between the features of our dataset, we performed Linear Regression. Here we tried to find the relationship between BMI and Mental Illness, depression more specifically. We also observed experimentally that the risk of a person who was overweight, obese or extremely obese to develop a psychiatric illness were 45-90 per cent higher than a person of average weight. We received an accuracy value of 0.690, after applying Linear Regression to the dataset. Using more sophisticated machine learning techniques would increase the precision. Experimental findings indicate that the method presented is almost equivalent to other state-of-the-art models.