AimTo explore the association between the exercise anticipation, function and self-efficacy in patients after knee surgeries over six months and to identify the predictors for rehabilitation.MethodsThis observational study used the cross-sectional survey method and was divided into two stages: (1) designing the experimental video materials and answer cards about exercise anticipation, and (2) analyzing the correlation of the level of exercise anticipation, knee function, modified gait efficacy scale (mGES), self-efficacy for rehabilitation outcome scale (SER), self-efficacy for exercise scale (SEE), time up and go task (TUG) and knee joint angle in walking. We used IBM SPSS modeler 18.0 software for establishing the Bayesian network data mining model, which can identify strong positive and negative associations.ResultsA total of 110 patients were included in this study. Our research confirmed that the exercise anticipation score exhibited the significant correlation with SER (r=0.552, P<0.01), SEE (r=0.457, P<0.01), TUG (r=−0.419, P<0.01) and knee joint angle in walking (r=−0.342, P<0.01). There is only one parent node of exercise expectation, that is, rehabilitation self-efficacy, which shows that the rehabilitation self-efficacy of patients after knee surgery is directly related to their ability to judge exercise expectation. Meanwhile this study verified the model results, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) is 0.572 (755/1320), indicating that the prediction performance is acceptable.ConclusionThis preliminary study confirmed that improving the exercise anticipation and rehabilitation self-efficacy is an important method of enhancing the knee function in patients after knee surgeries over six months. In the future, the long-term effect of the exercise anticipation and self-efficacy should be researched.