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Inferring the Nutrient Content of Food With Prior Information
Author(s) -
LaFrance Jeffrey T.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
american journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.949
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1467-8276
pISSN - 0002-9092
DOI - 10.2307/1244042
Subject(s) - citation , agricultural experiment station , library science , agriculture , resource (disambiguation) , foundation (evidence) , computer science , political science , law , history , computer network , archaeology
Given measurements on the nutrient content of the U.S. food supply and a coherent reduced form empirical model of the demand for foods, we can analyze the effect of agricultural farm and food policy on nutrition. Using unpublished documents from the HNIS, estimates of the percentages of seventeen nutrients supplied by twenty-one foods were compiled for the period 1952-1983. The Bayesian Method of Moments is applied to this data set to obtain a proper prior for the purpose of drawing year-to-year inferences about the nutrient content of the U.S. food supply for the period 1909-1994. Information theory and the Kullback-Leibler cross entropy criterion are used to formalize the inference problem.