Doctor recommendation on healthcare consultation platforms: an integrated framework of knowledge graph and deep learning
ISSN: 1066-2243
Article publication date: 8 June 2021
Issue publication date: 15 March 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Recommending suitable doctors to patients on healthcare consultation platforms is important to both the patients and the platforms. Although doctor recommendation methods have been proposed, they failed to explain recommendations and address the data sparsity problem, i.e. most patients on the platforms are new and provide little information except disease descriptions. This research aims to develop an interpretable doctor recommendation method based on knowledge graph and interpretable deep learning techniques to fill the research gaps.
Design/methodology/approach
This research proposes an advanced doctor recommendation method that leverages a health knowledge graph to overcome the data sparsity problem and uses deep learning techniques to generate accurate and interpretable recommendations. The proposed method extracts interactive features from the knowledge graph to indicate implicit interactions between patients and doctors and identifies individual features that signal the doctors' service quality. Then, the authors feed the features into a deep neural network with layer-wise relevance propagation to generate readily usable and interpretable recommendation results.
Findings
The proposed method produces more accurate recommendations than diverse baseline methods and can provide interpretations for the recommendations.
Originality/value
This study proposes a novel doctor recommendation method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the method in generating accurate and interpretable recommendations. The research provides a practical solution and some managerial implications to online platforms that confront information overload and transparency issues.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72001144), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2020M682757), Innovative Research Team of Shanghai International Studies University (No. 2020114044), Guangzhou Science and Technology Plan Project (No. 202002030384), and National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 20BTQ075).
Citation
Yuan, H. and Deng, W. (2022), "Doctor recommendation on healthcare consultation platforms: an integrated framework of knowledge graph and deep learning", Internet Research, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 454-476. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-07-2020-0379
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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