Neutrosophic Weighting of Epidemiological Criteria Using Jensen–Shannon Divergence: An Extended CRITIC Method for Prioritizing Parasitic Species in Public Health

Intestinal parasitic infections remain a significant public health burden in resource-limited settings, yet prioritization of species for surveillance and intervention is complicated by incomplete epidemiological data and conflicting criteria. This study addresses the problem of ranking eight intestinal parasite species under uncertainty using data from 110 patients across five clinical and epidemiological criteria: prevalence, abnormal consistency, mucus rate, coinfection, and diarrhea rate. We propose a novel framework that integrates (i) Wilson confidence intervals and bootstrapping to quantify estimation uncertainty; (ii) single-valued neutrosophic sets to capture truth, indeterminacy, and falsity; (iii) an extended CRITIC method employing Jensen–Shannon divergence instead of Pearson correlation to capture non-linear relationships between criteria; and (iv) the MARCOS method for final ranking. The results show that under the proposed neutrosophication, mucus rate emerges as the most influential criterion (weight = 0.3038) under Jensen–Shannon divergence, while abnormal consistency rate becomes the second most important (0.2135), and coinfection receives a moderate but non-negligible weight (0.1659). The ranking is stable at the extreme positions across the four dissimilarity functions tested, with Ascaris lumbricoides and Entamoeba coli consistently occupying the top two positions (though the order varies by method), and Giardia lamblia is consistently last. The main theoretical contribution is the integration of uncertainty quantification, neutrosophication, and non-linear divergence into a single MCDM framework. From a practical perspective, the results provide actionable priorities for screening programs, with mucus rate recommended as a key clinical indicator for surveillance.