Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by globular-toast 2087 days ago
Mine was predicted much lower than it really is, but I'm lean with big muscles, so that is to be expected, I suppose.
1 comments

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.