HIFCF: An effective hybrid model between picture fuzzy clustering and intuitionistic fuzzy recommender systems for medical diagnosis

•We focused on improving the quality of medical diagnosis.•A hybrid model between picture fuzzy clustering and recommender systems was shown.•It added the cluster information of patients into the new similarity degree.•It was experimentally validated on the benchmark dataset of UCI Machine Learning.•It has better accuracy than other relevant algorithms. The health care support system is a special type of recommender systems that play an important role in medical sciences nowadays. This kind of systems often provides the medical diagnosis function based on the historic clinical symptoms of patients to give a list of possible diseases accompanied with the membership values. The most acquiring disease from that list is then determined by clinicians’ experience expressed through a specific defuzzification method. An important issue in the health care support system is increasing the accuracy of the medical diagnosis function that involves the cooperation of fuzzy systems and recommender systems in the sense that uncertain behaviors of symptoms and the clinicians’ experience are represented by fuzzy memberships whilst the determination of the possible diseases is conducted by the prediction capability of recommender systems. Intuitionistic fuzzy recommender systems (IFRS) are such the combination, which results in better accuracy of prediction than the relevant methods constructed on either the traditional fuzzy sets or recommender system only. Based upon the observation that the calculation of similarity in IFRS could be enhanced by the integration with the information of possibility of patients belonging to clusters specified by a fuzzy clustering method, in this paper we propose a novel hybrid model between picture fuzzy clustering and intuitionistic fuzzy recommender systems for medical diagnosis so-called HIFCF (Hybrid Intuitionistic Fuzzy Collaborative Filtering). Experimental results reveal that HIFCF obtains better accuracy than IFCF and the standalone methods of intuitionistic fuzzy sets such as De, Biswas & Roy, Szmidt & Kacprzyk, Samuel & Balamurugan and recommender systems, e.g. Davis et al. and Hassan & Syed. The significance and impact of the new method contribute not only the theoretical aspects of recommender systems but also the applicable roles to the health care support systems.