A co-evolving memetic wrapper for prediction of patient outcomes in TCM informatics

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) relies on the combined effects of herbs within prescribed formulae. However, given the combinatorial explosion due to the vast number of herbs available for treatment, the study of these combined effects can become computationally intractable. Thus feature selection has become increasingly crucial as a pre-processing step prior to the study of combined effects in TCM informatics. In accord with this goal, a new feature selection algorithm known as a co-evolving memetic wrapper (COW) is proposed in this paper. COW takes advantage of recent research in genetic algorithms (GAs) and memetic algorithms (MAs) by evolving appropriate feature subsets for a given domain. Our empirical experiments have demonstrated that COW is capable of selecting subsets of herbs from a TCM insomnia dataset that shows signs of combined effects on the prediction of patient outcomes measured in terms of classification accuracy. We compare the proposed algorithm with results from statistical analysis including main effects and up to three way interaction terms and show that COW is capable of correctly identifying the herbs and herb by herb effects that are significantly associated to patient outcome prediction.