A novel approach in discovering significant interactions from TCM patient prescription data

The efficacy of a traditional Chinese medicine medication derives from the complex interactions of herbs or Chinese Materia Medica in a formula. The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach to systematically generate combinations of interacting herbs that might lead to good outcome. Our approach was tested on a data set of prescriptions for diabetic patients to verify the effectiveness of detected combinations of herbs. This approach is able to detect effective higher orders of herb-herb interactions with statistical validation. We present an exploratory analysis of clinical records using a pattern mining approach called Interaction Rules Mining.