I calculated the average face of a UK Member of Parliament and here’s what I found

The UK Parliament Digital Service has recently released an archive of official portraits of MPs shot by photographer Chris McAndrew (under a CC BY licence! Open Data, yay!) As I’m playing with image manipulation and Machine Learning to train a cohort of medical researchers, I thought the portraits would make an excellent test of what’s possible in the wild.

Using Machine Learning on faces has recently been subject of controversy, when researchers at Stanford University developed an algorithm that detects whether the face in a photo belongs to a gay person. Steering away from controversy, I thought that it would be interesting to find out what the average MP looks like. There has been a good deal of research on this concept, some of which is rather catchy. In 2015 the Guardian reported that we tend to find average faces the most attractive. I’m not sure this applies to MPs (and let’s avoid all jokes about average, i.e. centrist, faces), but here we go.

This is the average face of a British Member of Parliament. So angelic that it borders the uncanny valley.

The average Member of Parliament

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So, what does the average MP look like…