About the Authors

James Kaufman

jhkauf@us.ibm.com

Affiliation IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, United States of America

Justin Lessler

Affiliation Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

April Harry

Current address: Department of Statistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America

Affiliation IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, United States of America

Stefan Edlund

Affiliation IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, United States of America

Kun Hu

Affiliation IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, United States of America

Judith Douglas

Affiliation IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, United States of America

Christian Thoens

Affiliation Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Berlin, Germany

Bernd Appel

Affiliation Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Berlin, Germany

Annemarie Käsbohrer

Affiliation Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Berlin, Germany

Matthias Filter

Affiliation Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Berlin, Germany

Competing Interests

SE, KH, JD, and JK are paid employees of IBM Almaden Research Center. All other authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: SE KH JK. Performed the experiments: KH MF CT SE AH. Analyzed the data: BA CT KH AH AK JL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SE AH JK MF CT JL. Wrote the paper: SE KH JD JK. Preprocessed/organized raw food sales data: CT BA AK. Designed/wrote algorithm: SE. Planned/clustered data: AH CT. Proposed use of retail data with public health data: JK.