Back to Main Case-Based Reasoning Page > What Is Case-Based Reasoning? >

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a decision-making method used by human beings throughout their daily lives, drawing on previous experiences and using them for new situations.

Key characteristics are:

• It focuses on the similarity of a present problem to one or more specific problems that were solved in the past;
• It does not rely on measures of central tendency, such as averages, standard deviations, and medians;
• It is a process that informs decisionmakers by examining the context and richness of individual cases from the past;
• It is a familiar process that is a normal, intuitive method of decisionmaking for humans in everyday life.