A novel approach for e-health recommender systems

Abstract

The increasing use of the internet for health information brings challenges due to the complexity and abundance of data, leading to information overload. This highlights the necessity of implementing recommender systems (RSs) within the healthcare domain, with the aim of facilitating more effective and precise healthcare-related decisions for both healthcare providers and users. Health recommendation systems can suggest suitable healthcare items or services based on users' health conditions and needs, including medications, diagnoses, hospitals, doctors, and healthcare services. Despite their potential benefits, RSs encounter significant limitations, including data sparsity, which can lead to recommendations that are unreliable and misleading. Considering the increasing significance of health recommendation systems and the challenge of sparse data, we propose an effective approach to improve precision and coverage in recommending healthcare items or services. This aims to assist users and healthcare practitioners in making informed decisions tailored to their unique needs and health conditions. Empirical testing on two healthcare rating datasets, including sparse datasets, illustrate that our proposed approach outperforms baseline recommendation methods. It excels in improving both the precision and coverage of health-related recommendations, demonstrating effective handling of extremely sparse datasets.