A connectionist approach for similarity assessment in case-based reasoning systems

Abstract Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems support ill-structured decision making. In ill-structured decision environments, decision makers (DMs) differ in their problem solving approaches. As a result, CBR systems would be more useful if they were able to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of individual decision makers. Existing implementations of CBR systems have been mainly symbolic, and symbolic CBR systems are unable to adapt to the preferences of decision makers (i.e., they are static). Retrieval of appropriate previous cases is critical to the success of a CBR system. Widely used symbolic retrieval functions, such as nearest-neighbor matching, assume independence of attributes and require specification of their importance for matching. To ameliorate these deficiencies connectionist systems have been proposed. However, these systems are limited in their ability to adapt and grow. To overcome this limitation, we propose a distributed connectionist-symbolic architecture that adapts to the preferences of a decision maker and that, additionally, ameliorates the limitations of symbolic matching. The proposed architecture uses a supervised learning technique to acquire the matching knowledge. The architecture allows the growth of a case base without the involvement of a knowledge engineer. Empirical investigation of the proposed architecture in an ill-structured diagnostic decision environment demonstrated a superior retrieval performance when compared to the nearest-neighbor matching function.