Affiliations: [a] Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan
| [b] Microsoft Taiwan Corporation, Taipei, Taiwan
| [c] Department of Emergency Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital and National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
| [d] Department of Emergency Medicine, Sijhih Cathay General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. R. J. Kuo, Ph.D., National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan. E-mail: rjkuo@mail.ntust.edu.tw.
Abstract: Taiwan is an endemic area for chronic hepatitis disease. Since the early 1980’s, liver cancer has become the first cancer mortality causes among other cancers in Taiwan. Besides, liver cirrhosis and chronic liver diseases are the sixth rank and seventh rank in the causes of death, respectively. This is a serious disease affecting people’s health and it brings a lot of medical cost as well. This study develops a medical cost forecasting model for the acute hepatitis patients in the emergency room. In order to consider the uncertainty and hesitation in the human being’s thinking, this study employs the intuitionistic fuzzy logic (IFL) since it considers membership, non-membership, and hesitation values simultaneously. The proposed model combines the intuitionistic fuzzy neural network (IFNN) with Gaussian membership function and Yager-Generating function to enhance the performance of FNN. Furthermore, a back-propagation learning algorithm and genetic algorithm (GA) are applied in order to optimize the parameters and weights of the proposed IFNN. The proposed IFNN is applied to solve ten benchmark datasets including the nonlinear control and prediction problems. The computational results showed that the GA-IFNN is more efficient than conventional algorithms, such as an artificial neural network (ANN), a fuzzy neural network (FNN), and a support vector regression (SVR). In the real-world problem, the proposed method can really support physicians in planning medical resources and make a good decision to make the most efficient use of limited resources.
