Abstract
Syndrome differentiation-based treatment is one of the key characteristics of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The process of syndrome differentiation is difficult and challenging due to its complexity, diversity and vagueness. Analyzing syndrome principles from historical records of TCM using data mining (DM) technology has been of high interest in recent years. Nevertheless, in most relevant studies, existing DM algorithms have been simply developed for TCM mining, while the combination of TCM theories or its characteristics with DM algorithms has rarely been reported. This paper presents a novel Symptom-Syndrome Topic Model (SSTM), which is a supervised probabilistic topic model with three-tier Bayesian structure. In the SSTM, syndromes are considered as observed topic labels to distinguish certain symptoms from possible symptoms according to their different positions. The generation of our model is in full compliance with the syndrome differentiation theory of TCM. Experimental results show that the SSTM is more effective than other models for syndrome differentiating.
Highlights
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been existing for more than 3000 years
We propose a generative probabilistic topic model Symptom-Syndrome Topic Model (SSTM) to capture the relationship between symptoms and the syndromes from TCM records
We present a novel Symptom-Syndrome Topic Model (SSTM) that can effectively analyze complex and changeable syndrome differentiation patterns from TCM historical clinic records
Summary
TCM has been existing for more than 3000 years. Different from modern orthodox biomedicine, it has an independently developed system of medical knowledge. One of the significant characteristic of TCM is to treat diseases based on syndrome differentiation This is a process of comprehensive judgment based on analysis, induction, reasoning via four-ways information diagnosis. In order to accurately master the complex structure of syndromes, and establish a diagnostic standard for TCM, in time, it is of great significance to analyze the principles of syndrome differentiation. This is beneficial for the inheritance, the improvement and the development of the diagnosis theory of TCM [15]. Principles from TCM historical records are acquired as patterns It is different from other relevant researches that we distinguish certain and possible symptoms in our model. The conclusion and future work are illustrated in the Section 5
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