An Associated Representation Method for Defining Agricultural Cases in a Case-Based Reasoning System for Fast Case Retrieval

As an artificial intelligence technique, case-based reasoning has considerable potential to build intelligent systems for smart agriculture, providing farmers with advice about farming operation management. A proper case representation method plays a crucial role in case-based reasoning systems. Some methods like textual, attribute-value pair, and ontological representations have been well explored by researchers. However, these methods may lead to inefficient case retrieval when a large volume of data is stored in the case base. Thus, an associated representation method is proposed in this paper for fast case retrieval. Each case is interconnected with several similar and dissimilar ones. Once a new case is reported, its features are compared with historical data by similarity measurements for identifying a relative similar past case. The similarity of associated cases is measured preferentially, instead of comparing all the cases in the case base. Experiments on case retrieval were performed between the associated case representation and traditional methods, following two criteria: the number of visited cases and retrieval accuracy. The result demonstrates that our proposal enables fast case retrieval with promising accuracy by visiting fewer past cases. In conclusion, the associated case representation method outperforms traditional methods in the aspect of retrieval efficiency.