In case-based reasoning, the adaptation of a source case in order to solve the target problem is at the same time crucial and difficult to implement. The reason for this difficulty is that, in general, adaptation strongly depends on domain-dependent knowledge. This fact motivates research on adaptation knowledge acquisition (AKA). This paper presents an approach to AKA based on the principles and techniques of knowledge discovery from databases and data-mining. It is implemented in CABAMAKA, a system that explores the variations within the case base to elicit adaptation knowledge. This system has been successfully tested in an application of case-based reasoning to decision support in the domain of breast cancer treatment.
Design is a complex open-ended task and it is unreasonable to expect a case-base to contain representatives of all possible designs. Therefore, adaptation is a desirable capability for case-based design systems, but acquiring adaptation knowledge can involve significant effort. In this paper adaptation knowledge is induced separately for different criteria associated with the retrieved solution, using knowledge sources implicit in the case-base. This provides a committee of learners and their combined advice is better able to satisfy design constraints and compatibility requirements compared to a single learner. The main emphasis of the paper is to evaluate the impact of specific-to-general and general-to-specific learning on adaptation knowledge acquired by committee members. For this purpose we conduct experiments on a real tablet formulation problem which is tackled as a decomposable design task. Evaluation results suggest that adaptation achieves significant gains compared to a retrieve-only CBR system, but shows that both learning biases can be beneficial for different decomposed sub-tasks.  A major challenge for case-based reasoning (CBR) is to overcome the knowledge-engineering problems incurred by developing adaptation knowledge. This paper describes an approach to automating the acquisition of adaptation knowledge overcoming many of the associated knowledge-engineering costs. This approach makes use of inductive techniques, which learn adaptation knowledge from case comparison. We also show how this adaptation knowledge can be usefully applied. The method has been tested in a property-evaluation CBR system and the technique is illustrated by examples taken from this domain. In addition, we examine how any available domain knowledge might be exploited in such an adaptation-rule learning-system.