Health Forum Thread Recommendation Using an Interest Aware Topic Model

Abstract

We introduce a general, interest-aware topic model (IATM), in which known higher-level interests on topics expressed by each user can be modeled. We then specialize the IATM for use in consumer health forum thread recommendation by equating each user's self-reported medical conditions as interests and topics as symptoms of treatments for recommendation. The IATM additionally models the implicit interests embodied by users' textual descriptions in their profiles. To further enhance the personalized nature of the recommendations, we introduce jointly normalized collaborative topic regression (JNCTR) which captures how users interact with the various symptoms belonging to the same clinical condition. In our experiments on two real-world consumer health forums, our proposed model significantly outperforms competitive state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% in recall. Importantly, we show that our IATM+JNCTR pipeline also imbues the recommendation process with added transparency, allowing a recommendation system to justify its recommendation with respect to each user's interest in certain health conditions.