Discrimination of prediction models between cold-heat and deficiency-excess patterns.

•We collected questionnaire items, constructed prediction models and extracted the important items.•The new sentence is ‘The important items of deficiency-excess and cold-heat patterns overlapped if we ignored an unbalanced proportion of them.•We changed our training data sampling method to a balanced one.•Our new balanced prediction model successfully excluded the interaction between deficiency–excess and cold–heat pattern.