A Bayesian deep recommender system for uncertainty-aware online physician recommendation

Online physician recommender systems alleviate information overload by automatically recommending the best-fit physicians to patients. In contrast to general recommendations, physicians with greater uncertainty (i.e., greater variance in patients’ feedback) may not be preferred as this could affect patients’ treatment. However, most existing recommender systems don't consider uncertainty, reducing systems’ reliability and patients’ readiness to trust. To address this concern, this study leverages Bayesian theory and develops an uncertainty-aware online physician recommender system, including a Bayesian deep collaborative filtering (BDCF) model and a novel uncertainty-aware ranking algorithm. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate the superiority of BDCF and the ranking algorithm. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.