MD-LDA: a supervised LDA topic model for identifying mechanism of disease in TCM

Purpose In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the mechanism of disease (MD) constitutes an essential element of syndrome differentiation and treatment, elucidating the mechanisms underlying the occurrence, progression, alterations and outcomes of diseases. However, there is a dearth of research in the field of intelligent diagnosis concerning the analysis of MD. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, we propose a supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model, termed MD-LDA, which elucidates the process of MDs identification. We leverage the label information inherent in the data as prior knowledge and incorporate it into the model’s training. Additionally, we devise two parallel parameter estimation algorithms for efficient training. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmark MD identification dataset, named TMD, for training MD-LDA. Finally, we validate the performance of MD-LDA through comprehensive experiments. Findings The results show that MD-LDA is effective and efficient. Moreover, MD-LDA outperforms the state-of-the-art topic models on perplexity, Kullback–Leibler (KL) and classification performance. Originality/value The proposed MD-LDA can be applied for the MD discovery and analysis of TCM clinical diagnosis, so as to improve the interpretability and reliability of intelligent diagnosis and treatment.