Multidimensional group recommendations in the health domain

Abstract

Providing useful resources to patients is essential in achieving the vision of participatory medicine. However, the problem of identifying pertinent content for a group of patients is even more difficult than identifying information for just one. Nevertheless, studies suggest that the group dynamics-based principles of behavior change have a positive effect on the patients' welfare. Along these lines, in this paper, we present a multidimensional recommendation model in the health domain using collaborative filtering. We propose a novel semantic similarity function between users, going beyond patient medical problems, considering additional dimensions such as the education level, the health literacy, and the psycho-emotional status of the patients. Exploiting those dimensions, we are interested in providing recommendations that are both high relevant and fair to groups of patients. Consequently, we introduce the notion of fairness and we present a new aggregation method, accumulating preference scores. We experimentally show that our approach can perform better recommendations to small group of patients for useful information documents.