Fuzzy rule-based similarity model enables learning from small case bases

The concept of similarity plays a fundamental role in case-based reasoning. However, the meaning of “similarity” can vary in situations and is largely domain dependent. This paper proposes a novel similarity model consisting of linguistic fuzzy rules as the knowledge container. We believe that fuzzy rules representation offers a more flexible means to express the knowledge and criteria for similarity assessment than traditional similarity metrics. The learning of fuzzy similarity rules is performed by exploiting