A Connectionist Indexing Approach for CBR Systems*

Maria Malek

TIMC-LIFIA
bat. Lifia, 46 ave Flix Viallet,
38031 Grenoble, France
Email: Maria.Malek@imag.fr



Abstract. An important factor that plays a major role in determining the performances
of a CBR system is the complexity and the accuracy of the case retrieval phase. Both flat
memory and inductive approaches suffer from serious drawbacks. In the first approach,
the search time becomes considerable when dealing with large scale memory base, while
in the second one the modifications of the case memory becomes very complex because
of its sophisticated architecture.
In this paper, we show how we can construct a simple efficient indexing system structure.
We construct a case hierarchy with two levels of memory: the lower level contains cases
organised into groups of similar cases, while the upper level contains prototypes, each
of which represents one group of cases. The construction of prototypes is made by using
an incremental prototype-based network. This upper level parallel memory is used as an
indexing system during the retrieval phase.
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