Matilde Pós-de-Mina Pato, LASIGE’s researcher and PhD student, published the paper “Survey on Recommender Systems for Biomedical Items in Life and Health Sciences” in ACM Computing Surveys journal, a high-ranked journal in the field of Computer Science (h-index of 190, Scimago Q1), in December 2023. The paper was co-authored by LASIGE’s integrated researchers Márcia Barros and Francisco M. Couto.

The exponential growth of biomedical data generation has posed significant challenges in retrieval and analysis. This study undertakes a comprehensive survey of recommender system (RS) approaches within the biomedical domain, focusing on the existing challenges related to large-scale biomedical information retrieval systems. The researchers’ methodology encompasses collecting original research studies, identifying entities and models, and exploring the potential of knowledge graphs (KGs) to improve outcomes. Their analysis uncovers that most papers utilised model-based collaborative filtering algorithms. Additionally, it was observed that many available datasets diverged from the conventional format of <user, item, rating>. Furthermore, qualitative evaluations of RSs primarily relied on classification metrics. Ultimately, the researchers curated and organised a unique dataset, Sur-RS4BioT, which includes 60 papers.

The paper is available here.