Applied Machine Learning

Food Item Classifier

The project is included because it shows practical model comparison: feature design, overfitting analysis, test-set performance, and tradeoff reasoning.

Overview

Food Item Classifier predicted food items from student responses and compared multiple model families to understand generalization performance.

Motivation

The goal was not just to train a model. The useful part was comparing how different approaches behaved under the same prediction task and what kinds of features improved or weakened test performance.

Technical approach

  • Applied feature engineering to structure the input representation.
  • Compared decision trees, KNN, and neural networks.
  • Analyzed overfitting and test-set behavior.
  • Interpreted model tradeoffs rather than treating one score as the whole result.

What I built / contributed

Qixuan built the classifier workflow, compared model behavior, and used evaluation results to reason about generalization. The project supports his AI/ML positioning in a grounded way.

Result or evaluation

The case study demonstrates a careful applied ML workflow: features, baselines, comparison, and interpretation. It also connects to his broader interest in model evaluation.

Tools

Python, model comparison, feature engineering.

This is a course project. Public artifacts should be attached only after confirming the data and code can be shared.