or food pattern, food combinations, dietary habit, dietary score, dietary index) is a
combination of food components (food items, food groups, or nutrients) that summarizes an
overall diet for a study population. Three approaches have been proposed in the literature to
derive DPs [6]: hypothesis-driven, or a priori, approach; exploratory, or a posteriori,
approach; and recently, reduced rank regression (RRR), which is a mix of an exploratory
and hypothesis-driven approach since it not only uses available dietary data of the study but
also incorporates prior information by using a set of variables (nutrients or biomarkers) that
is known to predict disease