Eating healthier: Exploring nutrition information for healthier recipe recommendation

Highlights：

• We propose a healthy recipe recommendation framework (NutRec), which first builds a healthy pseudo-recipe considering the nutritional values and then scans the recipe dataset for items resembling the pseudo-recipe. Our proposed NutRec relies not only on the relations between the ingredients themselves but also on those of their quantities, which ultimately dictate the healthiness of a recipe. To the best of our knowledge, no prior study has incorporated these features.

• The pseudo-recipe is a list of ingredients with their quantities, and the nutritional values of the pseudo-recipe should match the predefined targets as best as possible. To generate the pseudo-recipe, we first propose an embedding-based ingredient predictor, which embeds all the ingredients into a latent space and predicts the supplemented ingredients based on the distances of ingredient representations; we then propose an amount predictor to compute the quantities of the supplemented ingredients.

• We conduct extensive experiments with two real recipe datasets, and the experimental results confirm the superiority of our methods over the baselines. To facilitate the community research, we have publicly released the datasets.