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by blago 2084 days ago
BMI was way off but the metric itself is such a crude generalization so this is probably excusable.
2 comments

Mine was predicted much lower than it really is, but I'm lean with big muscles, so that is to be expected, I suppose.
Exactly! My real BMI is 25, and just like you, I am on the muscular side. The estimate was 19.
You may enjoy this blogpost I made that goes into how the BMI prediction algorithm was developed. It's the only one in the project that I trained myself.

https://www.sherpapieces.eu/overview/predicting-your-bmi-fro...

Like you said, muscles matter quite a bit. It's attractive to use photos af athletes to train the algorithm, because there are a lot of websites that show their photos along with their weight and height (which you need to calculate a BMI). But since muscles weigh so much more than fat, athletes have high BMI with slim bodies, which warps the algorithm.

I didn't use athletes for this reason (it's trained on a diet of 50% Chinese celebrities and 50% American arrest records). But I found projects that do use these photos.

My BMI is 25.2 and the webpage calculated 25.1.

It would have been interesting to see some summary statistics for each of the predictions.