TCMPR: TCM Prescription Recommendation Based on Subnetwork Term Mapping and Deep Learning

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an indispensable role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Based on a patient’s symptom phenotypes, computation-based prescription recommendation methods can recommend personalized TCM prescription using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. However, owing to the complexity and individuation of a patient’s clinical phenotypes, current prescription recommendation methods cannot obtain good performance. Meanwhile, it is very difficult to conduct effective representation for unrecorded symptom terms in an existing knowledge base. In this study, we proposed a subnetwork-based symptom term mapping method (SSTM) and constructed a SSTM-based TCM prescription recommendation method (termed TCMPR). Our SSTM can extract the subnetwork structure between symptoms from a knowledge network to effectively represent the embedding features of clinical symptom terms (especially the unrecorded terms). The experimental results showed that our method performs better than state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the comprehensive experiments of TCMPR with different hyperparameters (i.e., feature embedding, feature dimension, subnetwork filter threshold, and feature fusion) demonstrate that our method has high performance on TCM prescription recommendation and potentially promote clinical diagnosis and treatment of TCM precision medicine.