Boosting CBR agents with genetic algorithms

Abstract

In this paper we present a distributed system in which several case-based reasoning (CBR) agents cooperate under a boosting schema. Each CBR agent knows part of the cases (a subset of the available attributes) and is trained with a subset of the available cases (so not all the agents know the same cases). The solution of the system is then computed by means of a weighted average of the solutions provided by the CBR agents. Weights are actively learnt by a genetic algorithm. The system has been applied to a breast cancer application domain. The results show that with our methodology we can improve the results obtained with a case base in which attributes have been manually selected by physicians, saving physicians work in future. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.