Posted on Tue 09 March 2010

Cluster analysis of what the world eats

Keeping with the theme of the post below, I used a clustering algorithm to group the different countries according to what they eat. I simply played around with the number of clusters until I got something I thought resembled reality, so don’t interpret this as an in-depth analysis.
  • Group 1: Lot’s of coffee and offal. They don’t like fish and fruits, but eat their veggies. Similar to Group 2.
  • Group 2: Lot’s of calories per day, all kinds of meat, alcohol, milk, butter, potatoes and sugar. Vegetable oils are used for cooking. No beans here.
  • Group 3: Fish and rice (which coincidentally is what I had for dinner yesterday). They use coconut oil and don’t like milk or cheese.
  • Group 4: They like bovine meat, fruits and sugar. They also use palm oil, and don’t like veggies.
  • Group 5: Not many calories per day, lots of starchy roots, beans and pulses.
  • Group 6: Lot’s of carbs (wheat and cereals). They eat their veggies and use olive oil and soybean oil.
The code is here and the data (taken from a database put together by the blog Canibais e Reis) is here.



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