Effective healthcare service recommendation with network representation learning: A recursive neural network approach

Recently, recommender systems have been combined with healthcare systems to recommend needed healthcare items for both patients and medical staff. By monitoring the patients’ states, healthcare services and their consumed smart medical objects can be recommended to a medical team according to the patient’s critical situation and requirements. However, a common drawback of the few existing solutions lies in the limited modeling of the healthcare information network. In addition, current solutions do not consider the typed nature of healthcare items. Moreover, existing healthcare recommender systems lack flexibility, and none of them offers re-configurable healthcare workflows to medical staff. In this paper, we take advantage of collaborative filtering and representation learning principles, by proposing a method for the recommendation of healthcare services. These latter follow a predefined execution pattern, i.e. treatment/medication workflow, that is determined by our framework depending on the patient’s state. To achieve this goal, we model the healthcare information network as a knowledge graph. This latter, based on an incremental learning method, is then transformed into a cuboid space to facilitate its processing. That is by learning latent representations of its content (e.g., smart objects, healthcare services, patients symptoms, etc.). Finally, a collaborative recommendation method is defined to select the high-quality healthcare services that will be composed and executed according to a determined workflow model. Experimental results have proven the efficiency of our solution in terms of recommended services’ quality.