Studying the relationship between nutrition, leisure and physical activity with promoting mental health of 13-18-year-old students in Iran using Naive Bayes technique

Children and adolescents are vulnerable to mental disorders. Therefore, identifying the factors affecting this type of disorder in adolescents can be an important step in preventing and controlling these diseases, especially in their early stages, and data mining science can be effective in solving this problem.

The data of the present applied research were collected from the information of 14274 students aged 7 to 18 years registered in the database of the Institute for Primary Prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. The sample size by using purposive sampling was 5283 students. The data collection tool was the Caspian Questionnaire. For determining the relationship between variables, the simple Bayesian classification method is used. The data were analyzed by RapidMiner software.

In the northern regions, high (daily) consumption of dairy products (milk, yogurt, and cheese), in the southern and central regions high consumption of lunch per week, and in the western regions high consumption of fresh vegetables and cooking are the most important factors affecting ideal mental health. In all four areas, more than half of people with ideal mental health exercise a lot at school each week. Also, the average time of working with computer per week is the most important factor that has a negative impact on mental health.

By examining different areas, the most important factors affecting ideal mental health are nutrition. This shows the importance of the impact of nutrition on this issue. Therefore, making appropriate decisions in the field of nutrition can play an important role in improving the mental health of society and it will lead to improving the performance of individuals in society.