Abstract: Objective To explore the treating rules of some national famous old doctors of traditional Chinese medicine’s medication for diabetic nephropathy(DN).Methods The treatment rules of diabetic nephropathy in 60 national famous old doctors of traditional Chinese medicine were collected, auxiliary system software,the inheritance of traditional Chinese medicine, the software integration analysis, improved mutual information method, the complex system entropy and entropy of unsupervised clustering hierarchy clustering data mining methods were applied. Results In the 71 selected consilia, the appearance frequency of symptoms and the frequency of each herb and association rules among the herbs were computed, 26 core combinations and 6 new prescriptions were also mined from the database. Conclusion Data analysis methods can be used to find the national famous old doctor of traditional Chinese medicine in the treatment of diabetic nephropathy.

Key words: national famous old doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, diabetic nephropathy, association rules, clustering algorithm