An Empirical Study on Combining Instance-Based and RuleBased Classifiers. Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development

One of the most important challenges in developing problem solving methods is to combine and synergistically utilize general and specific knowledge. This paper presents one possible way of performing this integration that might be generally described as follows: "To solve a problem, first try to use the conventional rule-based approach. If it does not work, try to find a similar problem you have solved in the past and adapt the old solution to the new situation". We applied this heuristic for a classification task. The background concepts of this heuristic are standard cases (the source of data for the rules) and exceptional cases (representative of the specific knowledge). The presented empirical study has not shown this attempt to be successful in accuracy when it is compare to its parents methods: instance-based and rule-based approach, but a careful policy in the distribution of standard and exceptional cases might provide a competitive classifier in terms of accuracy and comprehensibility.