Mining Compatibility Rules from Irregular Chinese Traditional Medicine Database by Apriori Agorithm

摘要

This paper aims to mine the knowledge and rules on compatibility of drugs from the prescriptions for curing arrhythmia in the Chinese traditional medicine database by Apriori algorithm. For data preparation, 1 113 prescriptions for arrhythmia, including 535 herbs (totally 10884 counts of herbs) were collected into the database. The prescription data were preprocessed through redundancy reduction, normalized storage, and knowledge induction according to the pretreatment demands of data mining. Then the Apriori algorithm was used to analyze the data and form the related technical rules and treatment procedures. The experimental result of compatibility of drugs for curing arrhythmia from the Chinese traditional medicine database shows that the prescription compatibility obtained by Apriori algorithm generally accords with the basic law of traditional Chinese medicine for arrhythmia. Some special compatibilities unreported were also discovered in the experiment, which may be used as the basis for developing new prescriptions for arrhythmia.