VI INDUCTION AND REASONING FROM CASES

1 IntroductionWe present the INRECA european project (ESPRIT 6322) on integration of induction and case-based reasoning (CBR) technologies for solving diagnostic tasks. A key distinction betweencase-based reasoning and induction is given in [1]: "In case-based methods, a new problem issolved by recognising its similarities to a specific known problem then transferring the solutionof the known problem to new one (...) In contrast, other methods of problem solving derive asolution either from a general characterisation of a group of problems or by search through astill more general body of knowledge". In this paper, we distinguish between a pure inductiveapproach and a case-based one on the basis that induction first computes an abstraction of thecase database (ex: a decision tree or a set of rules) and then uses this general knowledge forproblem solving. During the problem solving stage, the system does not access the cases.