Mining medical data to identify frequent diseases using Apriori algorithm

The data mining is a process of analyzing a huge data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. The information can be converted into knowledge about historical patterns and future trends. Data mining plays a significant role in the field of information technology. Health care industry today generates large amounts of complex data about patients, hospitals resources, diseases, diagnosis methods, electronic patients records, etc,. The data mining techniques are very useful to make medicinal decisions in curing diseases. The healthcare industry collects huge amount of healthcare data which, unfortunately, are not “mined” to discover hidden information for effective decision making. The discovered knowledge can be used by the healthcare administrators to improve the quality of service. In this paper, authors developed a method to identify frequency of diseases in particular geographical area at given time period with the aid of association rule based Apriori data mining technique.