Application of Apriori Improvement Algorithm in Asthma Case Data Mining

Abstract

In Chinese medicine, asthma cases contain a large amount of empirical data which are obtained from the clinical diagnosis of doctors throughout the year. Data correlation analysis method is among the common mechanisms which are used to mine association between the (1) prescriptions and prescribers (doctors in this case) and (2) symptoms and medications for a particular disease in the hospitals. In this paper, initially, a thorough analysis of expected performance and shortcomings of the Apriori algorithm in mining of medical case data is presented. Secondly, we propose an extended version of the traditional Apriori algorithm which is primarily based on the fast response of computer to bit-string logic operation. A comparative evaluation of the proposed and existing Apriori algorithms is presented particularly in terms of running time, mining of frequent items set and strong association rules. Both experimental and simulation results have proved that the proposed extended Apriori algorithm has outperformed existing algorithms when it is applied to asthma medication and combined symptom-medication data for the association analysis. Furthermore, the association relationship between mind asthma case data and medication is effective in the analysis of asthma case data with significant application value which is verified by the experimental data and observations.