Eating disorders are enduring conditions characterized by elevated rates of mortality and morbidity, presenting a serious threat to life. Among these disorders, binge eating disorder is the most prevalent. Therefore, it is an important health problem that often results in obesity worldwide. This study was conducted to evaluate the eating attitudes and behaviors of university students and predict binge eating disorder using machine learning methods. The study was carried out on 306 individuals (117 males, 189 females). Individuals' personal characteristics were questioned with the questionnaire form. The Bulimic Investigatory Test Edinburgh (BITE) test was used to determine whether individuals taking part in the study had binge eating disorder. In this study, in which binge eating disorder was classified, different artificial neural network models were created by changing the basic parameters, and the optimum model was assessed accordingly. Among the models created with different layers and activation functions, the optimum results were obtained using the number of fully connected layers as 2, first and second layers' sizes as 10, and ReLU, a non-linear activation function, in the Bilayered Neural Network structure. This study is the first trial in which binge eating disorder is predicted using machine learning methods, and we believe that machine learning is an important tool to help researchers and clinicians diagnose, prevent, and treat eating disorders at an early stage.
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