A self-learning expert system for diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine

A novel self-learning expert system for diagnosis in Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was constructed by incorporating several data mining techniques, mainly including an improved hybrid Bayesian network learning algorithm, Naive-Bayes classifiers with a novel score-based strategy for feature selection and a method for mining constrained association rules. The data-driven nature distinguished the system from those existing TCM expert systems based on if-then rules to address knowledge elicitation problem. Moreover, the learned knowledge was provided in multiple forms including causal diagram, association rule and reasoning rules derived from classifiers. Finally, five representative cases were diagnosed to evaluate the performance of the system and the encouraging results were obtained. The results show that the prototype system performs well in diagnosis of TCM, and could be expected to be useful in the practice of TCM. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.