A Hierarchical Structure-Enhanced Personalized Recommendation Model for Traditional Chinese Medicine Formulas Based on KG Diffusion Guidance

Artificial intelligence technology plays a crucial role in recommending prescriptions for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Previous studies have made significant progress by focusing on the symptom-herb relationship in prescriptions. However, several limitations hinder model performance: (i) Insufficient attention to patient-personalized information such as age, BMI, and medical history, which hampers accurate identification of syndrome and reduces efficacy. (ii) The typical long-tailed distribution of herb data introduces training biases and affects generalization ability. (iii) The oversight of the 'monarch, minister, assistant and envoy' compatibility among herbs increases the risk of toxicity or side effects, opposing the 'treatment based on syndrome differentiation' principle in clinical TCM. Therefore, we propose a novel hierarchical structure-enhanced personalized recommendation model for TCM formulas based on knowledge graph diffusion guidance, namely TCM-HEDPR. Specifically, we pre-train symptom representations using patient-personalized prompt sequences and apply prompt-oriented contrastive learning for data augmentation. Furthermore, we employ a KG-guided homogeneous graph diffusion method integrated with a self-attention mechanism to globally capture the non-linear symptom-herb relationship. Lastly, we design a heterogeneous graph hierarchical network to integrate herbal dispensing relationships with implicit syndromes, guiding the prescription generation process at a fine-grained level and mitigating the long-tailed herb data distribution problem. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and one clinical dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of TCM-HEDPR. In addition, we incorporate insights from modern medicine and network pharmacology to evaluate the recommended prescriptions comprehensively. It can provide a new paradigm for the recommendation of modern TCM.