Abstract
Recommender systems use machine-learning techniques to make predictions about resources. The medical field is one where much research is currently being conducted on recommender system utility. In the last few years, the amount of information available online that relates to healthcare has increased tremendously. Patients nowadays are more aware and look for answers to healthcare problems online. This has resulted in a dire need of an effective reliable online system to recommend the physician that is best suited to a particular patient in a limited time. In this article, a hybrid doctor-recommender system is proposed, by combining different recommendation approaches: content base, collaborative and demographic filtering to effectively tackle the issue of doctor recommendation. The proposed system addresses the issue of personalization through analysing patient's interest towards selecting a doctor. It uses a novel adoptive algorithm to construct a doctor's ranking function. Moreover, this ranking function is used to translate patients' criteria for selecting a doctor into a numerical base rating, which will eventually be used in the recommendation of doctors. The system has been evaluated thoroughly, and result show that recommendations are reasonable and can fulfil patient's demand for reliable doctor's selection effectively.