A fuzzy aspect-based approach for recommending hospitals

Abstract

The process to assess a hospital performance usually needs the interaction of a lot of experts and patients and is very costly and time-consuming. Nevertheless, the availability of patient opinions on the Internet offers a great opportunity to develop systems that evaluate hospitals based on user feedback. The content of these opinions is very challenging, including information about the hospital services but also stories about their own patients, their families, and personal feelings or beliefs before or after leaving a hospital. Therefore, the task of recommending hospitals according to the quality of their services becomes really complicated. This study describes an application for ranking hospitals based on the user preferences about the different offered services as well as the opinions about them. First, it semiautomatically classifies all predefined hospital aspects, calculates the sentiment orientation, and represents their associated polarity by intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Second, by means of the user preferences towards the different aspects, an aggregation operator, and a multicriteria decision-making algorithm, all hospitals are ranked. To assess this methodology, a large set of reviews about hospitals have been collected. Further, considering all patient ratings about the different hospitals, an algorithm for ranking them is proposed, which develops baselines for comparison. In addition, an interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy approach has been also implemented to compare the obtained results. These results confirm the soundness of the proposal.