Classifying Environmental System Situations by means of Case-Based Reasoning: a Comparative Study

The step of identifying to which class of operational situation belongs the current Environmental System situation is a key element to build successful Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS). Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a good technique to solve new problems based in previous experience. Main assumption in CBR relies in the hypothesis that similar problems should have similar solutions. When working with labelled cases, the retrieval step in CBR cycle can be seen as a classification task. The new cases will be labelled (classified) with the label (class) of the most similar case retrieved from the Case Base. In Environmental Systems, these classes are operational situations. Thus, similarity measures are key elements in obtaining a reliable classification of new situations. This paper describes a comparative analysis of several commonly used similarity measures, and a study on its performance for classification tasks. In addition, it introduces L’Eixample distance, a new similarity measure for case retrieval. This measure has been tested with good accuracy results, which improve the performance of the classification task. The testing has been done using two environmental data sets and other data sets from the UCI Machine Learning Database Repository.