PresRecCD: A Novel Herbal Prescription Recommendation Framework with Cross-Domain Learning and Neural Collaborative Filtering

Wansong Zhang, Xin Dong, Kuo Yang, Lei Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Rouye Huang, Runshun Zhang, Xuezhong Zhou

Abstract: Herbal prescriptions hold significant importance in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnosis and treatment, embodying millennia of clinical case summaries and wisdom. Despite numerous proposed methods for herbal prescription recommendation (HPR), significant challenges persist due to the lack of comprehensive clinical data, particularly regarding the relationships between symptoms and herbs. This scarcity poses considerable hurdles for effective HPR modeling. In this study, we introduced a novel herbal prescription recommendation framework with cross-domain learning and neural collaborative filtering (termed PresRecCD). The cross-domain learning mechanism is introduced to learn the noise-reduced cross-domain features of herbs and symptoms in the unified space, alleviating the sparsity of data, and neural collaborative filtering is utilized to carry out prescription recommendations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PresRecCD model over the SOTA model. This study contributes to enhancing the performance of the HPR model, ultimately benefiting the efficiency and precision of clinical treatment.