(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 163

Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

Neural Network based Regression Model for

Accurate Estimation of Human Body Fat - Obesity
Assessment using Circumference Measures
N.Revathy1 and Dr.R.Amalraj2
1
Department of Computer Applications, Karpagam College of Engineering, Coimbatore, India
revsforu@yahoo.com
2
Department of Computer Science, Sri Vasavi College, Erode, India

skinfold based measurement is very tedious and may lead to

Abstract: Obesity is a matter of great concern for individuals
and organizations including the armed forces. Excess fat is
detrimental to physical fitness and work performance. Although
the height-weight tables adopted by the armed forces for obesity
assessment are simple to use, yet they are not accurate enough,
as a muscular individual may be labeled obese while a lean
person with normal weight range may escape detection
although he may have an abnormal fat content. The author
compared the skin-fold method of body fat assessment,
circumferences method of body fat assessment and the Body
Mass Index (BMI). The circumference method is recommended
to be used in the armed forces rather than the inaccurate
height-weight measures.
inaccurate measurements. The other laboratory based
techniques such as total body water and body fat by
bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) and deuterium oxide
dilution (D2O) are also comparatively expensive.
But, there are simple and cost effective methods
which use the age and the body circumference
measurements which are easy to obtain without much
measurement errors. There are lot of statistical methods and
formulas to estimate the percentage of fat in human body. In
this paper, we have proposed a neural network based model
for body fat estimation using simple circumference
measures.

keywords: Obesity, Overweight, Body Mass Index, Skin-fold, Measurement Based Body Fat Estimation Methods
Circumference, Neural Networks There are two commonly used methods for body fat
measurements. They are
Ø Skin fold thickness method
Ø Circumference method
1. Introduction Skin fold method was standardized by Dumin and
Womersley [15]. In this method, the body fat is estimated
using different skin fold measured which are taken form
Throughout most of human history, a wide girth
different parts of the body such as midtriceps, biceps,
has been viewed as a sign of health, and prosperity. Yet it is
subscapular, suprailiac, etc., regions. These measurements
ironical that several million people are sent early to their
will be made using an apparatus called constant force
graves by damaging effects of eating too much and moving
caliber.
too little. Clearly, overweight cannot be taken lightly. The
Circumference methods were first developed by
problem of obesity is a matter of serious concern to the
Wright, Davis and Doston. This methods estimates the
individual as well as the state. Obesity increases mortality
percentage of body fat using different circumference
and morbidity at all ages. Excess fat is considered a
measures taken in different parts of the body such as, upper
detriment to physical fitness and work performance, which
and lower arm, waist, neck, abdomen, hip thigh etc.,
is also affected by a number of other variables such as age,
sex, training, attitude, and motivation, genetic and
Skin fold thickness method of body fat measurement:
environmental factors. Obesity is a condition in which there
Since most adipose tissue is in the subcutaneous layer, the
is an excessive accumulation of body fat in body. Estimation
present body fat has been traditionally estimated by
of human body fat has lot of applications in different areas
measuring skin folds at midtriceps, biceps, subscapular and
of medicine and other medical fitness tests. The most
suprailiae regions, using a constant force calipers. The
accurate way of calculating body fat percentage is the one
method was standardized by Dumin and Womersely [15].
provided by Siri’s equation [6], which requires a
Body fat is indirectly assessed from body density. The
measurement of Density via weighting under water. But this
percent body fat is calculated by the equation: % BF =
is expensive and unpractical. Anthropometry (height,
[(4.95 / body density) – 4.5] * 100. Though more accurate
weight and multiple skinfold thicknesses) by trained
than the, H-W measures, the main drawback of the skin fold
observers using standardized technique to calculate body fat
measurements is their poor repeatability in the absence of a
by Durnin and Womersley's equation [15]. But taking
skilled observer. Moreover, measurements may be difficult
164
or impossible in very obese people whose skin folds would
not fit between the jaws of the measuring caliper.
2. Techniques Used in Measurement Based
Body Fat Estimation Methods
Regression and multi-dimensional regression are
the most commonly used statistical techniques in the design
of the above two types of measurement based fat estimation
methods. There is lot of statistical methods available to
solve multi-dimensional regression problem. In statistics,
regression analysis includes any techniques for modeling
and analyzing several variables, when the focus is on the
relationship between a dependent variable and one or more
independent variables.
Most of the existing techniques for measurement
based body fat estimation formulas were based on statistical
relationships in the data. But, in the recent years, new
techniques such as; artificial neural networks and fuzzy
inference systems were employed for developing of the
predictive models to estimate the needed parameters. Soft
computing techniques are also now being used as alternate
statistical tool.
Some previous work shows that the radial basis
function(RBF) neural network based prediction systems
exhibiting a high performance than multilayer perceptron
(MLP) network, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system
(ANFIS) and multiple regression (MR) technique. So in
this work, we explored the possibility of using a neural
network to solve the body fat estimation problem.
A radial basis function (RBF) neural network
is trained to perform a mapping from an m-dimensional
input space to an n-dimensional output space. RBFs can be
used for discrete pattern classification, function
approximation, signal processing, control, or any other
application which requires a mapping from an input to
an output. Radial Basis Functions (RBF) represent
alternative approach to MLP's in universal function
approximation. RBFs were first used in solving
multivariate interpolation problems and numerical analysis.
Their prospect is similar in neural network applications,
where the training and query targets are rather continuous.
While MLP performs a global mapping (i.e., all inputs
cause an output), RBF network performs a local mapping
(i.e., only inputs near specific receptive fields will produce
an activation). The units (in the hidden layer) receiving the
direct input from a signal may see only a portion of the
input pattern, which is further used in reconstructing a
surface in a multidimensional space that furnishes the best
fit to the training data. This ability of the RBF network to
recognize whether an input is near the training set or
outside the trained region provides a significant benefit over
MLP's. RBF's are useful in safety critical applications, as
well as in those having a high financial impact.
3. Definitions and Measurement
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Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
The height-weight tables suggested by body
composition working group have been extensively adopted
as a first line screening technique for obesity and the same
has been adopted by the India Armed Forces. Obesity is
defined as, weight 20% greater than the desirable weight for
that particular person.
Several methods have been used to assess body
composition. Most methods of measuring the fat content in
the living subject are, to a lesser or greater degree, indirect.
The three classical methods used in the lab are the
measurements of whole body density whole body water, and
whole body potassium. Though more accurate these method
are time consuming and not feasible for routine body fat
assessment.
Several workers have developed height-weight indices,
also called indices of relative weight or ‘indices of
adiposity’. These are easily calculated requiring nothing
more than the height(H), weight(W) and Age(A). A
commonly used index is the Body Mass Index (BMI) /
Quetlet’s index which is = weight (kg) / height (m)2. The
acceptable (normal) range is 20 to 25; A BMI of greater
than 27 is overweight while obesity is taken to start at a
BMI of 30, and a BMI of 40 and above indicates gross /
morbid obesity. The standards are the same for men and
women.
However the H-W indices measure ‘overweight’ rather
than obesity. Since the H-W indices cannot distinguish
between excess fat, excess muscle mass (e.g. in weight
lifters). Fluid retention (oedema), large bones etc., these
drawbacks lead to a high degree of inaccuracy.
Circumference methods of body fat measurement: In
circumference methods, estimates of present body fat are
made with equations based on circumference measures
typically involving areas prone to excess fat accumulation
such as the upper and lower arm, waist, hip and thigh. The
equations were first developed by Wright, Davis and Doston
in 1981 and include two body circumferences for males viz.
Neck circumference (NC), measured around the neck with
the measuring tape passing just below the larynx; Abdomen
circumference (AC), measured around the abdomen at the
level of the umbilicus. For females, three circumferences are
included in addition viz., Bicep circumference (BC),
measured at the largest circumference of the arm with the
arm extended and plan facing up; Forearm circumference
(FC), measured at the largest circumference of the forearm
and; Thigh circumference (TC), measured on the left
thigh just below the buttock. All circumferences are
measured in centimeters.
In 1984, Hodgdon and Beckett derived equations for
estimation of percent body fat in the males, using the same
circumference measures and height (in cms) of the
individual. The equations are:
Percent body fat (men)
= (0.740 * AC) – (1.249 * NC) + 0.528
Percent body fat (females) =
(1.051 * BC) – (1.522 * FC) – (0.89 * NC) + (0.326 * AC)
+ (0.597 * TC) + 0.707
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The circumference measures and height is used to
estimate body density by the following equation: Body
density (men)
=(0.19077*log10(ACNC)+(0.15456*log10[Ht])+1.0324
Percent body fat is then estimated from the body density
by the same equation as used in the skin fold method of
body fat measurement.
The estimate used by Hodgdon and Beckett is currently
used by U.S. Navy, Since October 1986 for the initial
screening for obesity during the initial medical examination
of its personnel. Conwayet al (1989), found that the
estimates of percent body fat were more strongly related
with physical fitness than were the H-W indices, and thus
concluded that circumference methods of body fat
estimation assess actual body fat more reliably than the H-
W indices.
4. Implementation of RBF Neural Network
Based Fat Percentage Estimation Model
Like most feed forward networks, RBFN has three layers,
namely, an input layer, a hidden layer, and an output layer.
The nodes within each layer are fully connected to the
previous layer nodes. A schematic diagram of an RBFN
with n inputs and m outputs is given in Fig. 1.
y1 yj ym
θ 01 Σ θ0 j Σ θ 0m Σ output
layer
Φ Φ Φ hidden
layer
input
layer
x1 xi xn
Figure 12 :. Schematic diagram of RBFN [5]
The input variables are each assigned to a node in
the input layer and pass directly to the hidden layer without
weights. The hidden layer nodes are the RBF units. Each
node in this layer contains a parameter vector called a
center. The node calculates the Euclidean distance between
the center and the network input vector, and passes the
result through a nonlinear function(.). The output layer is
essentially a set of linear combiners. The ith output yi due to
input vector x, x=[x1, . . ., xn]T, can be expressed as
( )
Ms
yi = θ 0 i + ∑θ ji Φ || x − c j ||, σ j
j =1
where Ms is the number of hidden units, cj and j are the
center and the width of the jth hidden unit respectively, ji
represents the weight between the jth hidden unit and the ith
output unit, and 0i represents the bias term of the ith
output unit.
In this work,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
Ø The dimension of the input layer will be equal to
the dimension of training patterns, that is the
number of circumference measures in the dataset.
Ø The number of Hidden Layer will be decided
automatically in the used Matlab version of RBF
network
Ø The dimension of the output layer will be equal to
one since there is only one output ‘percentage of
body fat’ which is to be mapped with respect to m
dimensional input.
Several ways have been proposed for training RBF
networks. Recently, Professor Simon has proposed the use
of Kalman filters for training RBF networks . We are going
to use this model for our application.
After training the RBF network with the selected
number records (50/100/150/200/250 records of the 13
measurements) the whole data set (252) is considered as
test data and fed in to the trained network and the value of
percentage of fat has been predicted.
Then the correlation between predicted values and
the originally calculated values (of under water weighing
method) has been calculated.
The correlation between two variables reflects the
degree to which the variables are related. The most common
measure of correlation is the Pearson Product Moment
Correlation or called Pearson's correlation in short. When
measured in a population the Pearson Product Moment
correlation is designated by the Greek letter rho (ρ). When
computed in a sample, it is designated by the letter "r" and
is sometimes called "Pearson's r."
Pearson's correlation reflects the degree of linear
relationship between two variables. It ranges from +1 to -1.
A correlation of +1 means that there is a perfect positive
linear relationship between variables.
5. Evaluation and Results
The Evaluation Dataset
The proposed model has been tested with the
human body fat data set distributed by Roger W. Johnson,
Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, South
Dakota School of Mines & Technology, Rapid City, South
Dakota, North America. This dataset has been originally
provided by Dr. A. Garth Fisher (personal communication,
October 5, 1994), age, weight, height, and 10 body
circumference measurements are recorded for 252 men.
Each man's percentage of body fat was accurately estimated
by an underwater weighing and the density as well as the
measured percentage of body fat were provided along with
that data.
• Age (years)
• Weight (lbs)
• Height (inches)
• Neck circumference (cm)
• Chest circumference (cm)
166 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
• Abdomen circumference (cm) 5 250 7.9687 0.1802
• Hip circumference (cm)
The following graph shows the time taken for
• Thigh circumference (cm) training for different number of records used for training.
• Knee circumference (cm) As shown in the graphs, The time is gradually increasing
with respect to the increase in the size of training data set.
• Ankle circumference (cm)
• Biceps (extended) circumference (cm) 6. Conclusion
• Forearm circumference (cm) The proposed idea has been successfully
• Wrist circumference (cm) implemented using Matlab. The input parameters of the
• Percent body fat from Siri's (1956) equation (%) RBF network has been selected based on several
• Density determined from underwater weighing (cm) experiments. The experiments were repeated for several
These data are used to produce the predictive times with different number of records.
equations for lean body weight. The scope is to predict body The arrived results were more significant and
fat percentage on the basis of these variables, using comparable. The performance measured in terms of the
proposed RBF based regression model. The all body Pearson's correlation between the originally calculated
measurements are continuous variables. The first 13 values and newly estimated values reached almost 0.9
variables will be used as inputs to RBF network and 14th which is better than most of the classical methods and
value (the Percent body fat %) will be used as the expected almost equal to that of previous skinfold based methods.
output during training the network. The density value (15) The accuracy of the system was good while the
is just given here as an information and it will not be used number of records used for training is high. As far as we
for training or testing. have tested, the network can be trained in few seconds with
The following two dimensional plots are roughly few hundred records. After that, it was capable of predicting
showing the distribution of data. Singular Value the percentage of fat of few hundred records with in a
Decomposition is used to find the first principal component fraction of a second. So there will not be any practical
of the 13 features circumference measure data set. In x axis, difficulty in using the system different classes of training
we used that first principal component and the y axis we sets.
used the percentage of fat. So, the plot is showing only
approximate distribution of the data. 7 Scopes for Future Enhancements
It is obvious that the data used in this experiment
contains some outliers and little errors. Even with those
outliers and errors, the proposed system performed well. If
we apply suitable methods to remove the outliers and isolate
any abnormal records, in the training data set, then we can
expect better accuracy in prediction. Our future works will
address this issues. In this work, we have only used the
proposed regression model to estimate the percentage of
body fat. But this method is a generic model which can be
applied to any multidimensional non linear regression
Figure 2 : The 2D Plot of Input Data Space problem. So our future works will address other application
areas where the proposed model can bring better results.
Evaluation of RBF Training Performance
We have trained the RBF network with different Reference
number of records and measured the time taken for training
as well as the mean square error of last two consecutive [1] Wayt Gibbs W. Gaining on Fat Scientific American
iteration of the training. The following tables list the August 1996.
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Table 4 : Performance of Training swell potential of clayey soils", Geophysical Research
Abstracts, Vol. 12, EGU General Assembly,TURKEY,
Number of The Time 2010
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Sl. Records Taken For
Training Advances in Biological and Medical Physics, vol. IV,
No Used for Training
Error edited by J.H. Lawrence and C.A. Tobias, Academic
Training the RBF
1 50 2.4218 0.0230 Press, Inc., New York, 1956.
[4] Roger W. Johnson, Fitting Percentage of Body Fat to
2 100 3.3594 0.0645
Simple Body Measurements, Journal of Statistics
3 150 3.2812 0.1056
Education v.4, 1996
4 200 4.1562 0.1439
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 167
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[5] Katch, Frank and McArdle, William, Nutrition,
Weight Control, and Exercise, Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Boston, 1977
[6] Behnke, A.R., Wilmore, J.H. An anthropometric
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Authors Profile

N. Revathy received BSc Computer Science and Master of

Computer Applications (MCA) degree from Bharathiar University
in 2000 and 2003 respectively. Received M.Phil, Computer
Science degree from Alagappa University in 2005. At present
working as a Assistant Professor in Karpagam College of
Engineering, Coimbatore, India

Dr. R.Amalraj Completed Bsc Computer Science, Master of

Computer Applications (MCA) and PhD in Computer Science, At
present working as a Professor in Department of Computer
Science at Sri Vasavi College, Erode, India.