Association learning of Chinese herbal medicines and disease treatment efficacy

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) usually suffer from great pain. It is difficult to cure RA thoroughly. Among various treatment methods, the Chinese herbal medicine is attracting more and more attention. The aim of this study is to analyse the associations between the herbs and the effectively improved laboratory indexes used to evaluate the treatment efficacy. The data was collected from the First Hospital Affiliated to Anhui University of Chinese Medicine. The definition of effectively improved laboratory indexes was proposed. The association rules learning was applied to identify associations between the herbs and the effectively improved key laboratory indexes. Core herbs and their combination patterns were discovered from large-scale prescriptions. Our results were also validated by relevant traditional Chinese medicine theory and physicians' clinical experience, which indicated the applicability and reliability of our method in studying the effectiveness of herbal medicines.