[ariel-faigon]

Thanks mbrundle. I'm the person behind that git repository and honestly am in a bit of a shock that this is making hacker-news.

As I say in the README.md: please ignore the noise, the scales I used had 0.2 pound resolution, and my data-set was too small (and as one snarky commenter noticed, some words were misspelled). What is important is the big picture. There are actually numerous contradictions and irregularities in the data. In particular, any food item that appears only once or twice in the data-set, and is randomly coinciding with other features that make it biased the wrong way contributes to the error of the model.

So as I say in the README, I would ignore anything that's not near the top or bottom, and even those should be taken with a healthy dose of (noise/modeling) skepticism.

Anyway, the code is free for everyone to use so people are encouraged to run the experiment on themselves using more accurate methods and contributing more data. It only requires R+ggplot2 and vowpal wabbit. Cheers.