An Approach to Syndrome Differentiation in Traditional Chinese Medicine based on Neural Network

Although the traditional knowledge representation based on rules is simple and explicit, it is not effective in the field of syndrome differentiation in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which involves many uncertain concepts. To represent uncertain knowledge of syndrome differentiation in TCM, two methods were presented respectively based on certainty factors and certainty intervals. Exploiting these two methods, an approach to syndrome differentiation in TCM was proposed based on neural networks to avoid some limitations of other approaches. The main advantage of the approach is that it may realize uncertain inference of syndrome differentiation in TCM, whereas it doesn´t request experts to provide all possible combinations for certainty degrees of symptoms and syndromes. Rather than back propagation (BP) algorithm but its modification was employed to improve the capability of generalization of neural networks. First, the standard feedforward multilayer BP neural network and its modification were introduced. Next, two methods for knowledge representation, respectively based on certainty factors and certainty intervals, were presented. Then, the algorithm was proposed based on neural network for the uncertain inference of syndrome differentiation in TCM. Finally, an example was demonstrated to illustrate the algorithm.