Bayesian Case-Based Reasoning with Neural Networks

Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Given a problem, a case-based reasoning (CBR) system will search its case memory and use the stored cases to find the solution, possibly modifying retrieved cases to adapt to the required input specifications. In this paper we introduce a neural network architecture for efficient case-based reasoning. We show how Pearl’s probability propagation algorithm [12] can be implemented as a feedforward neural network and adapted for CBR. In our approach the efficient indexing problem of CBR is naturally implemented by the parallel architecture, and heuristic matching is replaced by a probability metric. This allows our CBR to perform theoretically sound Bayesian reasoning. We also show how the probability propagation actually offers a solution to the adaptation problem in a very natural way.