Title: A new model for physician assignment based on fuzzy rules extraction from climatic factors

Authors: Sima Hadadian; Zahra Naji-Azimi; Nasser Motahari Farimani; Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli

Addresses: Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Mashhad, Iran ' Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Mashhad, Iran ' Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Mashhad, Iran ' Computer Engineering School, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: The number of patients should be predicted to meet the physicians' demands in hospitals. In this study, a new multi-objective physician assignment model was designed based on the number of the patients estimated by the climatic factors. The number of patients was predicted through multiple linear regression (MLR) and fuzzy inference system (FIS). In the FIS, the feature selection was performed by the genetic-K-nearest neighbour (k-NN) algorithm. Then, fuzzy rules were extracted using fuzzy associative classification. After predicting the number of patients, the physician assignment model was designed. The case study is a paediatric hospital with four wards. The results indicated some medical fuzzy rules based on climatic factors. In addition, RMSE and MAE, as compared with MLR in all hospital wards, had a lower value in the FIS. Finally, the advantage of the assignment model could be attributed to its sensitivity to changes in the number of the patients.

Keywords: multi-objective model; physician assignment; fuzzy associative classification; FAC; fuzzy inference system; FIS; genetic-K-nearest neighbour algorithm; multiple linear regression; MLR.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2024.136552

International Journal of Operational Research, 2024 Vol.49 No.2, pp.204 - 230

Received: 01 Feb 2021
Accepted: 23 May 2021
Published online: 07 Feb 2024 *

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