Case‐Based Reasoning: Application Techniques for Decision Support

Decision‐support systems can be improved by enabling them to use past decisions to assist in making present ones. Reasoning from relevant past cases is appealing because it corresponds to some of the processes an expert uses to solve problems quickly and accurately. All this depends on an effective method of organizing cases for retrieval. This paper investigates the use of inductive networks as a means for case organization and outlines an approach to determining the desired number of cases—or assessing the reliability of a given number. Our method is demonstrated by application to decision making on corporate tax audits.