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Physician recommendation via online and offline social network group decision making with cross-network uncertain trust propagation

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Abstract

Online and offline integration is an increasingly popular method of performing modern medical services. To provide suggestions for physician selection by patients with full use of previous online and offline patient evaluations, this paper investigates online and offline social network group decision making (OAOSNGDM) in depth. With the aim of inferring the indirect trust relationships of online and offline patients, we first construct a q-rung orthopair fuzzy dual trust propagation operator based on the q-rung orthopair fuzzy trust function, which can effectively deal with inconsistency in trust functions among patients. Considering patient inconsistency in online and offline scenarios, which can increase the uncertainty of the trust relationship in cross-network propagation, we propose a q-rung orthopair fuzzy dual trust cross-network propagation operator by introducing cross-network propagation efficiency. Considering the signal-to-noise ratio, we calculate the trust propagation efficiency and introduce it into the trust propagation operators. To aggregate the trust information of multiple trust paths among patients, we introduce the Dempster rule from evidence theory which can handle the uncertainty of trust functions. In addition, to accurately determine the patient weights according to online and offline social networks, we integrate the ranking results of patients in terms of degree centrality, neighbor importance and betweenness centrality by developing an improved linear assignment method. We then propose a novel decision-making method for OAOSNGDM and design a complete decision-making process for the evaluation of physicians. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of our proposed method for the evaluation of physicians in an online and offline scenario.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72071030), the National Key R &D Program of China (No. 2020YFB1711900) and the Planning Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry of Education of China (No. 19YJA630042).

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  1. School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China

    Mingwei Wang, Decui Liang, Wen Cao & Yuanyuan Fu

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  1. Mingwei Wang
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  2. Decui Liang
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Correspondence to Decui Liang.

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Wang, M., Liang, D., Cao, W. et al. Physician recommendation via online and offline social network group decision making with cross-network uncertain trust propagation. Ann Oper Res (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-022-04827-9

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