Validation techniques for case-based reasoning systems

By their nature, case-based reasoning (CBR) systems, have a built-in set of test cases in their case library. Effective use of this feature can facilitate the validation process by minimizing the involvement of domain experts. This can reduce the cost of the validation procedure, and eliminate the subjectivity introduced by experts. This paper proposes a validation technique that makes use of the system's own case library to validate a CBR system. Called the case library subset test (CLST) technique, it evaluates the correctness of the retrieval and adaptation functions of the CBR engine with respect to the domain as represented by the case Library. It is composed of three phases, 1) the retrieval test, 2) the adaptation test, and 3) the domain coverage test. A complete description of the technique and an application of it to validate an existing CBR system are included in this paper.