A Novel Neutrosophic Interpretive Structural Modeling Approach

Abstract

Interpretive structural modeling is of paramount importance in barrier/risk/challenge analysis as a hierarchical visual map by emphasizing the root cause of the problems. It asks expert opinions to evaluate the causal relationships of identified variables. However, in many cases experts cannot determine a relationship or can be doubtful about stating an idea. In the meantime, the neutrosophic cognitive mapping provides a step-by-step guidance in order to deal with the indeterminate relationships. Therefore, this study aims to propose a neutrosophic ISM approach and to implement it for the medical tourism services' barriers during the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustrative example. In order to do that, text mining was conducted to the medical tourism-related tweets written in English from January to December 2020 via RapidMiner software, and the barriers in medical tourism were identified. Next, the relationships between these barriers were examined via expert evaluations, and the proposed neutrosophic ISM was applied to construct a structural model.