With the prevalence of backpacking and the convenience of using the Internet, many travelers like sharing their experiences in online communities. The development of online communities has changed the decision-making process of consumer purchasing, especially for travel, i.e., some travelers reconsider their decisions because they believe that the reviews of online communities are more valuable than advertisements. However, these reviews are not completely reliable since most reviews are provided without specific author information and the review data are too large to be observed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach (named ET) to evaluate the trustworthiness of reviews in online travel communities. Our method considers three concepts, including the sentiment similarity of reviewers in the social network, features of the reviews, and behaviors of the reviewers. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective in evaluating the trustworthiness of reviews.

Due to the increasing cost of health insurance, for decades, many countries have endeavored to constrain the cost of insurance by utilizing a DRG payment system. In most cases, under the DRG payment system, hospitals cannot exactly know which DRG code inpatients are until they are discharged. This paper focuses on the prediction of what DRG code appendectomy patients will be classified with when they are admitted to hospital. We utilize two models (or classifiers) constructed using the C4.5 algorithm and back-propagation neural network (BPN). We conducted experiments with the data collected from two hospitals. The results show that the accuracies of these two classification models can be up to 97.84% and 98.70%, respectively. According to the predicted DRG code, hospitals can effectively arrange medical resources with certainty, then, in turn, improve the quality of the medical care patients receive.

The rapid development of the internet has resulted in rapid e-business growth, with online malls attracting many shoppers due to the privacy and convenience they offer. Like traditional malls, online malls can provide photos, specifications, prices, etc. However, consumers cannot touch the products in reality, which creates risks for the purchase. To date, there has been no research focusing on topic-specific search engines for 3C product reviews based on the trustworthiness of the reviews. This study is the first to sort the reviews of electronic products according to the degree of trust, by analyzing the characteristics of the reviews and the reviewers. This study proposes the criteria for features of the reviews and reviewers to consider to evaluate the trustworthiness of the reviews; builds a search engine to collect the product reviews scattered in opinion websites; and sorts the results by trustworthiness to provide a reliable e-commerce experience. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted a set of experiments, and we adopted the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient to evaluate the similarity between our method and experts’ opinions. The experimental results showed a high correlation coefficient with the opinions of experts, demonstrating that our method is effective at finding trustworthy reviews on the internet.