An interactive case-based reasoning method considering proximity from the cut-off point

Case-based reasoning (CBR) models often solve problems by retrieving multiple previous cases and integrating those results. However, conventional CBR makes decisions by comparing the integrated result with the cut-off point irrespective of the degree of the adjacency between them. This can cause increasing misclassification error for the target cases adjacent to the cut-off point, since the results of previous cases used to produce those results are relatively inconsistent with each other. In this article, we suggest a new interactive CBR model called grey-zone case-based reasoning (GCBR) that makes decisions focusing additional attention on the cases near the cut-off point by interactive communication with users. GCBR classifies results automatically for the cases placed outside the cutoff point boundary area. On the other hand, it communicates with users to make decision for the cases placed inside the area by verifying characteristics of the dataset. We suggest the architecture of GCBR and implement its prototype. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.