Predicting patients' satisfaction with doctors in online medical communities: An approach based on XGBoost Algorithm

Abstract

Online medical communities have revolutionized the way patients obtain medical-related information and services. Investigating what factors might influence patients' satisfaction with doctors and predicting their satisfaction can help patients narrow their choices and increase their loyalty towards online medical communities. Considering the imbalanced feature of dataset collected from Good Doctor, the authors integrated XGBoost and SMOTE algorithms to examine what factors can be used to predict patient satisfaction. SMOTE algorithm addresses the imbalanced issue by oversampling imbalanced classification datasets. And XGBoost algorithm is an ensemble of decision trees algorithm where new trees fix errors of existing trees. The experimental results demonstrate that SMOTE and XGBoost algorithms can achieve better performance. The authors further analyzed the role of features played in satisfaction prediction from two levels: individual feature level and feature combination level.