Knowledge-Enhanced Attributed Multi-Task Learning for Medicine Recommendation

Medicine recommendation systems target to recommend a set of medicines given a set of symptoms which play a crucial role in assisting doctors in their daily clinics. Existing approaches are either rule-based or supervised. However, the former heavily relies on expert labeling, which is time-consuming and costly to collect, and the latter suffers from the data sparse problem. To automate medicine recommendation on sparse data, we propose MedRec, which introduces two graphs in modeling: (1) a knowledge graph connecting diseases, medicines, symptoms, and examinations; (2) an attribute graph connecting medicines via shared attributes and molecular structures. These two graphs enhance the connectivity between symptoms and medicines, which thus alleviate the data sparse problem. By learning the interrelationship between diseases, medicines, symptoms and examinations and the inner relationship within medicine, we can acquire unified embedding representations of symptoms and medicines which can be used in medicine recommendation. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we find that these two tasks: learning graph representation and medical recommendation can benefit each other.