2019 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Engineering (ECCE), 7-9 February, 2019

Empirical Study on Personality Trait Classification

by Food Related Preferences
Tasfia Hoque Raqeebir Rab Khushnoor Rafsan Jani Alam
Department of CSE Department of CSE Department of CSE
Ahsanullah University of Science and Ahsanullah University of Science and Ahsanullah University of Science and
Technology Technology Technology
Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh
tasfia9494@gmail.com jishan005@gmail.com tultul23rafsan@gmail.com

Saif Hasan Khan M. A. Wadud Shuvro Umme Zakia

Department of CSE Department of CSE School of Engineering Science
Ahsanullah University of Science and Ahsanullah University of Science and Simon Fraser University
Technology Technology Vacouver, Canada
Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh ummezakia@gmail.com
saif.sk3639@gmail.com wadudshuvro1993@gmail.com

Abstract—Human personality is a combination of the
behavior, emotion, motivation and thinking pattern and has
great impact on a person's life, health, and other related
preferences. Food preferences provide rich information for
studying personality of a person. In this paper, we conduct an
empirical study to predict human personality based on
restaurant review on food and other related preferences. We
choose the category to ‘judge/perceive’ from the 4 categories of
16 personality traits. A data set is built from a survey of 100
people based on a questionnaire about their food related
behavior along with standard personality traits. A
classification algorithm is proposed to classify the participant’s
personality from his/her food preference and surrounding
environment on a restaurant, using reinforcement learning
that utilizes temporal difference, model based, and on policy
techniques. We compare our proposed classification results
with standard classification solutions for personality detection
to determine the performance accuracy of our proposed model.
Keywords—personality trait, judge, perceive surrounding
environment, restaurant data, machine learning, reinforcement
learning
I. INTRODUCTION
Persons personality starts developing during childhood. It
can evolve and develop. Personality is important in many
aspects of our life. To understand a person, personality is all
we need. A new approach to identify personality trait is
based on the food choices or preferences. The psychological
factors can be used to classify people into certain type of the
16 personalities. A lot of researches, surveys, tests and works
have already been done related to food habits and personality
traits. The research and survey [1] showed that motivation
and intention of organic food choice in restaurant have
influence on personality of a person. Food-related
personality traits were significantly depends on the
motivation of choosing food. Food choice motives explained
the reasons of choosing organic food products in restaurants.
Also research work in [4] found that there is a relation with
person personality with liking and in-taking of spicy food
and showed that spicy food eaters are thrill seekers, lovers of
dangers activities. A relationship between foods related
personality traits, satisfaction and loyalty among visitors
attending food events are explored in [2]. In [6], the authors
found co-relation between people's diet and behavior. People
who prefer low fat are more dutiful, ordering, and conscious.
Meat eater persons are more open, have less extent feelings
etc. YG Kim et al [2] conducted a pilot test on 335 visitors
and studied the personality traits in tourism and hospitality.
They built a measurement model based on relationship
among food neophobia, food involvement, satisfaction, and
loyalty and indicated 16 personalities based on these
measurements. A person who has food neophobia is more
likely has negative effect on satisfaction and loyalty. On the
other hand a person with good eater has positive effect on
satisfaction, and loyalty. They built a measurement model for
food-related personality traits.
These researches show the relationship between food and
human psychology but there has not been anything that
directly tells us which personality trait a person belongs to by
their food choices and food related preferences. So it’s a big
challenge for us to tell whether a person is a ‘judge’ or a
‘perceive’? We found that spicy food lovers are more into
adventures and thrills which shows whether these people are
‘judge’ or ‘perceive’ in nature. So, the objective of this study
is to quantify the relationship between a person’s personality
and food habit using classification algorithm of Machine
Learning [ML]. In this paper we made our own food related
questions from [1] [11] research works and standard
personality test question that are not related to food
preference [10] and classify the personality using
Reinforcement Learning [RL]. We will assume the result
from the standard question is true and our food related
questions will be tested by the result of the standard
questions
II. BACKGROUND STUDY
A. Personality Traits
According to theory of psychological types by Carl G.
Jung's [7], people can be characterized by: Extraverted (E)
vs. Introverted (I): preference of human general attitude,
Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N): preference of believing external
world or imagination, Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F):
preference of one of the two functions of judging and
Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P): reflects how a person
implements the processed information. Judging people is
more organized and stick to his/her rule in life events. On the
other hand perceiving means that the person is inclined to
improve and explore alternative options.

978-1-5386-9111-3/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE

 In general, the 16 personality traits are categorized based
on four questions. These are [8]:
“Are you outwardly or inwardly focused?”
“How do you prefer to take in information?”
“How do you prefer to make decisions?”
“How do you prefer to live your outer life?”
Based on the first, second and third questions
respectively Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I), Sensing
(S) and Intuition (I), Thinking (T) and Feeling (F) are
introduced. Judge (J) and Perceive (P) is based on last
question. We choose judge (J) and perceive (P) from the 16
personality traits because our background studies showed
that J/P is more connected to food rather than other 3
personality traits. The noticeable characteristics are [9]:
With Judgers
Follow a timetable and stick to it.
Take time to prepare.
Follow the general agreement and make written
document on those areas that need more work and
discussion.
Analysis the achievements and decisions which are taken
so far.
Agree short time plan and need of closure.
With Perceivers
Allow time for things to flow, not necessarily follow time
table.
Prefer to bring new ideas and possibilities.
Encourage time for creativity.
Support self determination and freedom.
Accept changes in particular direction that are not
necessarily impulsive.
B. Data mining & machine learning techniques
Data mining is the process of analysis the interesting,
useful pattern of large volume of data and predict the
relationship among the data [12]. This area of computer
science is a combination of statistical analysis and artificial
intelligence (such as neural networks, machine learning etc)
with database management system to analyze the large
collections of digital data, known as data sets.
In our approach, we used a machine learning technique to
classify persons’ personality based on their food choices
preferences in the restaurant. Machine learning techniques
applied in such cases fall into the class of supervised
learning. But supervised learning is not suitable for our case.
We have used Reinforcement learning (RL) technique for
our research work. In RL agent learn from experience in the
form of reward and punishment and adapt the new situations
[13]. It is an ideal learning technique for data mining
scenarios. The agent is continuously sensing the
environment, which provides the data and makes decisions
using the feedback from its own action and experiences. Our
method calculates the reward and punishment and by that, it
increases or decreases the importance of food-related
questions. Questions which get more reward will get more
importance and vice versa in the case of punishment. Based
on the answers of these questions our method will tell
whether a person is a ‘Judge’(J) or ‘Perceive’ (P).
In this research work, we employ Temporal Difference
(TD) Method of RL, a model-based algorithm with a greedy
technique to estimate the policy of its next action. TD
methods adjust predictions about the future at each state of
its way before the final outcome is known and it is better
than Monte Carlo technique. TD learns the transition
probability T (s1 | (s0, a)) from the pair of current state s0 and
action a to the next state s1. If T is successfully learned, the
agent will know how likely to enter next state given current
state and action as input. The drawback of model-based
algorithms is it becomes impractical as the state space and
action space grows. In RL agent can be an on policy agent or
off policy agent. But TD uses on policy learning technique
for agent where a agent learn the value of next policy based
on its current action a derived from the current policy,
whereas off-policy agent learns based on the action a
obtained from another policy.
III. DATA COLLECTION METHODS
For our research, we designed questionnaire of 22
questions that reflect personality traits (J /P) and their
relation to food habit. The survey was conducted in a
restaurant for 100 anonymous participants who voluntarily
provided their food habit related feedback. The survey was
conducted online and offline based on the suitability to
approach the participants. The population is distributed over
various genders and ages to get a perfect range of answers
and variety of personality. Questions 1:11 are food habit
related and question 12:22 are based on standard personality
trait patterns.
A. Food Related Questions
Food related questions from questionnaires (Q1 to Q11) are
co-related and given weight accordingly such as W1 to W11.
The rationality between each question to a personality trait of
‘judge/perceive’ (P/J) are provided below:
Question Logic
Q1. Do you try to avoid food Never & Sometimes>>P
with fat?
Often & Mostly>>J
Q2. Do you try to follow Never & Sometimes
healthy diet? >>P
Often & Mostly>>J
Q3. Are you a fiber consumer? Yes >> J
No >> P
Q4. If you are having a bad Yes >>P
day and if you have little
money, do you go to a food No >>J
place to lighten up your mood?
Q5. One of your friends Take it if most of your
suggested to take a particular friends do.>>J
dish , would you rather
Go with your own
choice of food>>P
 Q6. Are you adventurous
about trying different unique
food?
Q7. Do you usually go to new
a place to eat or prefer the
known old one?
Q8. Are you a slow eater or
fast eater?
Q9. Which one do you do
mostly?
Yes>>J If the answer to a question is ‘judge’, we put J=1 & P=0,
and if the answer to a question is ‘perceive’, we assign P=-1
No >>P and J=0. For example, if there are six answers that say the
person is ‘judge’ and five answers that says the person is
I would prefer the new ‘perceive’, then the result would be +6-5=+1. Since it is a
one>>P positive number, we conclude that the person is a ‘judge’.
We added equal weight in the beginning to each of the
I would stick with old
the one>>J eleven questions. As the weight will be trained by the
dataset, the result would be obtained by the summation of the
Slow Eater>>P multiplier of weight and answer (1 or -1 or 0). Fig. 1 shows
the flow chart of the algorithm 1.
Fast Eater>>J
Try new items>>P

Known items which you

had before>>J
Q10. Does your eating style Yes>>J
include eating one food in its
No >>P
entirety before moving on to
the next?
Q11. Do you try to finish your Never & Sometimes
food even if you don’t feel like >>P
having it?
Often & Mostly>>J

B. Standard Personality Trait Questions

The personality trait questions are used in standard
personality test. These questions are collected from online
resource [10].

Question
Q12: You often spend time exploring unrealistic &
impractical yet interesting ideas
Q13: You often rather improvise (without preparation) than
spend time coming with detailed plan
Q14: Keeping your options open is more important than to
do list
Q15: You have no difficulties coming up with a personal
timetable and sticking to it
Q16: You feel very anxious/ nervous in stressful situation
Q17: You rarely do something just out of sheer curiosity
Q18: Being organized is more important to you than being
adaptable
Q19: Your home and work environment are quite tidy
Q20: Your travel plans are thought out Fig. 1. Classification algorithm for personality analysis.

Q21: Your work style is closer to random energy spikes

than to a methodical and organized approach
Q22: You rarely get carried away by fantasies and idea
IV. PROPOSED CLASSIFICATION MODEL
A. Proposed Algorithm For Classifying Personality
The proposed Algorithm 1 uses the food related
questionnaire to obtain the weights related to the personality
traits of Judge or Perceive.
B. Proposed Reinforcement algorithm for weight training
We used Reinforcement algorithm TD for weight training of
food-related questions. We have given balanced importance
to each of the eleven questions. The question that can bring
out more accurate personality will get more importance. The
importance will be given by multiplying weight to it. Every
time it contributes more to the correct answer it gets a reward
and if it contributes to a wrong answer it gets a punishment
by the rule of reinforcement. The reward is that its weight
will be increased a certain amount (+1 or -1) after being
multiplied by α, where α is learning rate. This weight will be
assigned by the proposed reinforcement algorithm 2. Initially
we assigned Wi=1 to each food question and α = 0.3. The
weight can be between of value 0 and 2.
Questions that give more accurate answer will get more
importance by assigning more weight to it in terms of giving
reward. For large dataset it will get more accurate. The
flowchart of algorithm 2 is shown in Fig 2.
before and after applying our proposed reinforcement
algorithm.
We made the result more accurate by applying
reinforcement algorithm. The importance of each question is
fixed by the reward and punishment. We notice that by the
increase of data the accuracy of the system increases.

Fig. 3. Allocated weight process.

Fig. 2. Reinforcement algorithm for personality analysis.

C. Performance Analysis
We multiplied the weight to each answer of every food
question and add all the weight together according to
Algorithm 1. If the answer is positive the result is that the
person is judge and if the answer is negative the result is that
the person is perceive. Fig 3 shows the weight allocation of
answers of the given questions asked to one person to predict
his/her personality and get negative result. So the person is
Pperceived. Finally, we compared these two set of
questionnaires result to see if our questions regarding food
are good enough give the right result and the result came
similar in almost eighty percent of the time.
Fig. 4. Accuracy gain with pervious Data.
After applying the proposed reinforcement algorithm
each question gets the deserved importance. We measured We implemented our algorithms in C++ and for data
the accuracy of our classifier. We also compared our system collection we made online survey in HTML. For data
analysis we used Visual Studio 2017 on Intel core i7 with 8
GB RAM. The execution time running the algorithm was
39.987 seconds.
In figure 5 (a) the green line represents the desired
output. The blue line represents the output without using the
reinforcement algorithm. The green line in figure 5 (b)
represents the data graph after applying the proposed
reinforcement algorithm.
(a)
(b)
We observed from Fig 5 (a) that performance of desired
output to classify personality is much better than classifier
performance of data without using RL for all size of data.
Later when the system learned from the data using RL and
started coping with the actual result the accuracy to classify
personality is increased as shown in Fig 5 (b). In the
beginning of the graph 5 (b) the blue and the green line does
not match that much. But for larger data set performance of
desired and learned data is very close. The accuracy becomes
70% at 90th data. Fig 4 shows that accuracy to predict
personality increases using RL technique than without using
RL technique for larger data. We observed from Fig 4 and
fig 5 (c) that accuracy to predict correct personality is 64%
before applying RL technique and it increases to 70% after
applying RL for 100 data. We can see that at first the
accuracy of the model before fixing the weight by
reinforcement algorithm is less than the model after applying
the algorithm. Slowly with the increase of data the accuracy
increases.
D. Some Observations
a) Question quality: If a question's answer is same
for all judge and perceive for some critical reason then the
increasing of weight would be invalid. That is why we chose
the questionnaires carefully.
70%
64%
(c)
Fig. 5. Performance analysis of the proposed algorithm: (a) before
applying RL (b) after applying RL (c) boxplot.
b) Total zero: We took odd number of
questions(eleven questions) to find the result from majority
questions(6 or above). So in the eleven questions there are
six answers that say the person is judge and five answer that
says the person is perceive then the result would be +6-
5=+1, it is a positive number. So we say the person is judge.
Seeing the result we understand if majority of the answers
was judge or perceive. But when weight is multiplied the
answer might be neither positive nor negative. Instead it
could be a zero. So the person would be 50% perceive and
50% judge.
c) Negative Weight: We cannot keep any negative
weight as negativity and positivity is deciding whether the
person is perceive or judge. If we keep negative weight we
might get the opposite result. We will stop decreasing the
weight value after it gets to zero indicating that the question
should not contribute to the output at that moment until the
weight increases by getting reward.
d) Non-confirmative Solution: New questions cannot
be added, and cannot tell personality from other questions,
Personality detail cannot be told about a person. We can
only say about one side of the personallity not the other 3
sides of 16 personality traits.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose a model of determining a
participant's personality whether he is in type of Judging or
Perceiving using reinforcement learning. We defined these
two types of personality through some researched and
analyzed questions. The questions are formed keeping in
mind of the food factors that are related to psychological
facts. We have collected data from a survey that we
conducted over 100 people and calculated weight to map the
data value feeding our algorithm. We have obtained 70% of
accuracy in determining ‘judge/perceive’ personality with
the reinforcement learning method.
In future, we want to add more questions in the food-
related questionnaire, more characteristic features of human
and use bigger population of participants for model training,
this will help us increasing accuracy of our classifier.

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