Analysis of herbal formulation in TCM: Infertility as a case study

Herbal prescription in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) relies on the experience of the prescribing doctor after appropriate diagnosis. The combination of herbs chosen, though based on the various Classics, can vary between patients with the same diagnosis. Furthermore, the underlying principles for the choice of herbs are not well defined, and the actual formations can also vary from doctor to doctor. We believe that the prescriptions are the embodiment of the wisdom of the successful doctors, in the process of diagnosis and treatment. Thus it is important to extract the wisdom and discover the knowledge important to the understanding of TCM. The data mining technique employed for analysis here is the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). This particular analytical method is adopted from social science study, where it is a small-N analysis, meaning that case number is small relative the number of causal factors. The results of this study in the form of configurations indicate not only the herbs (present herbs) necessary for a positive outcome, but the choice of some other herbs (absent herbs) may impact negatively on the outcome.