Abstract

Association rule mining can be combined with complex network theory to automatically create a knowledge base that reveals how certain drugs cause side-effects on patients when they interact with other drugs taken by the patient when they have two or more diseases. The drugs will interact with on-target and off-target proteins often in an unpredictable way. A computational approach is necessary to be able to unravel the complex relationships between disease comorbidities. We built statistical models from the publicly available FAERS dataset to reveal interesting and potentially harmful drug combinations based on sideeffects
and relationships between co-morbid diseases. This information is very useful to medical practitioners to tailor patient prescriptions for optimal therapy.