Recommendation Systems for the Healthcare Domain: A Comprehensive Survey of Evaluation Datasets

Healthcare Recommendation Systems (HRSs) primarily aim to offer advice, recommendations, or suggestions related to human healthcare. Similar to other information systems, datasets affect HRSs’ efficiency. The larger datasets can make the information more diverse and complete. Therefore, the recommendation systems can be more accurate and deliver better performance. In addition, several recent studies have revealed that to enhance the accuracy of systems, there should be a switch from a model-centered method to data-centricity. Therefore, several datasets have been introduced over the past few years to assess the effectiveness of HRSs. However, building new datasets and selecting suitable datasets to evaluate HRSs is an issue. Another problem is that there are presently no articles surveying the datasets that have been published to offer the requirements that a dataset uses to judge the HRSs needs to have. These are the reasons that motivated us to conduct this research. To address these problems, we systematically focus on a comprehensive survey of the datasets used to evaluate HRSs published in recent years. Some of the primary contributions of this study are as follows: (i) Surveying 34 datasets commonly used in methods for building and developing HRSs. (ii) Extracting 10 common characteristics and comparing datasets with those 10 common characteristics. (iii) Providing the 13 requirements regarding a dataset used in HRSs (iv) Comparing surveyed datasets and state-of-the-art HRSs based on 13 constructed requirements (v) Discussing the five main challenges and set out some directions for building new datasets in the future. The results of this research analysis are valuable to many new researchers in choosing or constructing suitable datasets to evaluate how they build their HRSs for the present and future.