Faculty of Electrical Engineering University of Belgrade

Case-Based Reasoning

Davitkov Miroslav, 2011/3116

1. Case-Based Reasoning definition

• Case-Based reasoning (CBR), broadly construed,

is the process of solving new problems
based on the solutions of similar past problems.

• CBR is reasoning by remembering:

It is a starting point for new reasoning

• Case-Based Reasoning is a well established research field

that involves the investigation of theoretical foundations,
system development and practical application building of
experience-based problem solving.

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1. Case-Based Reasoning definition

Everyday examples of CBR :

• An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that

exhibited similar symptoms

• A lawyer who advocates a particular outcome in a trial based on

legal precedents or a judge who creates case law.

• An engineer copying working elements of nature (practicing

biomimicry), is treating nature as a database of solutions to
problems.

• Case-based reasoning is a prominent kind of analogy making.

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2. CBR problem solver

1. Case – previously made and stored experience item

2. Case-Base – core of every case – based problem solver

- collection of cases

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2. CBR problem solver

• A case-based problem solver solves new problems primarily

by reuse of solutions from the cases in the case-base.

• For this purpose, one or several relevant cases are selected.

• One of the core assumptions behind CBR is that

similar problems have similar solutions.

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2. CBR problem solver

• Once similar cases are selected,

the solution(s) from the case(s) are adapted
to become a solution of the current problem.

• When a new (successful) solution to the new problem is

found,
a new experience is made,
which can be stored in the case-base to increase its
competence,
thus implementing a learning behavior.

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3. Types of CBR

There are three main types of CBR that differ significantly

from one another concerning case representation and
reasoning:

1. Structural (a common structured vocabulary, i.e. an ontology)

2. Textual (cases are represented as free text, i.e. strings)
3. Conversational
(a case is represented through a list of questions that varies from one
case to another ; knowledge is contained in customer / agent
conversations)

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4. CBR Cycle

• Despite the many different appearances of CBR

systems,
the essentials of CBR are captured in a surprisingly
simple and uniform process model.

• The CBR cycle is proposed by Aamodt and Plaza.

• The CBR cycle consists of 4 sequential steps around the

knowledge of the CBR system.

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4. CBR Cycle
Problem

New Case

RETRIEVE
Learned
Case

Retrieved Case

Previous New Case

RETAIN Cases

General Knowledge
Tested /
Repaired REUSE
Case

REVISE Solved Case

Confirmed Suggested
Solution Solution

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4. CBR Cycle

4.1. Retrieve

• One or several cases from the case base are selected,

based on the modeled similarity.

• The retrieval task is defined as finding a small number of cases from

the case-base with the highest similarity to the query.

• This is a k-nearest-neighbor retrieval task considering a specific

similarity function.

• When the case base grows, the efficiency of retrieval decreases =>
methods that improve retrieval efficiency,
e.g. specific index structures such as kd-trees, case-retrieval nets, or
discrimination networks.

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4. CBR Cycle

4.2. Reuse

• Reusing a retrieved solution can be quite simple if the solution is

returned unchanged as the proposed solution for the new problem.

• Adaptation (if required, e.g. for synthetic tasks).

• Several techniques for adaptation in CBR

- Transformational adaptation

- Generative adaptation

• Most practical CBR applications today try to avoid extensive

adaptation for pragmatic reasons.

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4. CBR Cycle

4.3. Revise

• In this phase, feedback related to the solution constructed so far is

obtained.

• This feedback can be given in the form of a correctness rating of the

result or in the form of a manually corrected revised case.

• The revised case or any other form of feedback enters the CBR
system for its use in the subsequent retain phase.

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4. CBR Cycle

4.4. Retain

• The retain phase is the learning phase of a CBR system (adding a

revised case to the case base).

• Explicit competence models have been developed that enable the

selective retention of cases (because of the continuous increase of the
case-base).

• The revised case or any other form of feedback enters the CBR
system for its use in the subsequent retain phase.

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5. CBR and the Future Internet

• The development of the future internet is affected by two major

factors: semantics and collaboration.

• Two of the most influencing developments of the Semantic Web are:

- the resource description language RDF (Resource Description
Framework)
- the knowledge representation language OWL (Web Ontology
Language), which is based on RDF

• Already before the development of RDF and OWL, XML has been
used as a case representation within the case-based reasoning
community.

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5. CBR and the Future Internet

• There is a notable similarity between the ontologies developed

within semantic applications and the representation of cases in
structural case-based reasoning.

• Due to this similarity RDF and OWL both lend themselves to be

used as case representation languages and thus expand the
possibilities of case-based reasoning within the general WWW.

• There are technological and methodological similarities between

ontologies and structured case-based reasoning and there are
synergies that can be reached by merging both approaches.

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5. CBR and the Future Internet

• CaseML - an RDF based Case Markup Language (by Chen and Wu);

CaseML offers a domain-independent case ontology and also aims to

make case-based reasoning available within the Semantic Web.

• SERVOGrid (by Aktas et al.) – also uses RDF for case

representation;

It is embedded in a conversational case-based reasoning system

that aids scientists in finding resources such as program code or data
that are needed to solve a specific task
by assisting them in describing the necessary resources using meta
data.

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5. CBR and the Future Internet

• jCOLIBRI framework - OWL is being used as the case interchange

language;

It is planned to advance the already distributed framework towards

an architecture consisting of Semantic Web Services (SWS)
where problem solving methods are represented as Web Services;

In order to use these services the whole case-based reasoning process

is decomposed into single tasks,
which are then carried out by according Web Services.

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5. CBR and collaborative filtering

• There is a close relation between collaborative filtering and CBR

and these two can benefit from each other.

• Example 1: Collaborative filtering is used to assess the similarity

between songs in a CBR system creating custom music compilations
(CoCoA) [Aguzzoli et al.].

• Example 2: A community based web search that uses the results of

previous web searches of similar users in order to improve web
search results [Briggs and Smyth].

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6. CBR applications

• During the past twenty years, many CBR applications have been
developed, ranging from prototypical applications build in research
labs to large-scale fielded applications developed by commercial
companies.

• Application areas of CBR include:

- help-desk and customer service
- recommender systems in electronic commerce
- knowledge and experience management
- medical applications and applications in image processing
- applications in law, technical diagnosis, design, planning
- applications in the computer games and music domain.

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7. CBR compared to other methods

• We will compare CBR with the rule induction algorithm

of machine learning.

• Like a rule-induction algorithm,

CBR starts with a set of cases or training examples;
it forms generalizations of these examples, albeit implicit ones,
by identifying commonalities between
a retrieved case and the target problem.

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7. CBR compared to other methods

• The key difference, however, between the implicit generalization in

CBR and the generalization in rule induction lies in when the
generalization is made.

• A rule-induction algorithm draws its generalizations from a set of

training examples before the target problem is even known; that is, it
performs eager generalization.

• This is in contrast to CBR, which delays (implicit) generalization of

its cases until testing time – a strategy of lazy generalization.

• CBR therefore tends to be a good approach for rich, complex

domains in which there are myriad ways to generalize a case.

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8. Criticism of the CBR

• Critics of CBR argue that it is an approach that accepts anecdotal

evidence as its main operating principle.

• Without statistically relevant data for backing and implicit

generalization, there is no guarantee that the generalization is
correct.

• There is recent work that develops CBR within a statistical

framework and formalizes case-based inference as a specific type of
probabilistic inference;
thus, it becomes possible to produce case-based predictions equipped
with a certain level of confidence.

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9. Conclusion

• The number of CBR approaches and applications developed up to

now has become quite large.

• There is a significant number of CBR research groups and

commercial companies, which develop CBR methods, software
components, and applications on a regular basis.

• CBR is not only a technology but also a (process oriented)

method.

• The combination of CBR with various other technologies within a

great bandwidth of applications has become increasingly attractive
for researchers as well as business professionals.

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10. References

• Ralph Bergmann, Klaus-Dieter Althoff, Mirjam

Minor, Meike Reichle, Kerstin Bach:
Case-Based Reasoning: Introduction and Recent
Developments
• Benjamin Heitmann, Conor Hayes:
Enabling Case-Based Reasoning on the Web of Data

• A. Aamodt, E. Plaza:
Case-Based Reasoning: Foundational Issues, Methodological
Variations, and System Approaches

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Thank you for your attention!

Questions?

davitkov.miroslav@gmail.com
dm113116m@student.etf.rs