An Empirical Evaluation of Model-Based Case Matching and Adaptation

Rangeland ecosystems typify physical systems having an incomplete causal theory. This paper describes CARMA, a system for rangeland pest management advising that uses model-based matching and adaptation to integrate case-based reasoning with modelbased reasoning for prediction in rangeland ecosystems. An ablation study showed that removing any part of the CARMA’s model-based knowledge dramatically degraded CARMA’s predictive accuracy. By contrast, any of several prototypical cases could be substituted for CARMA’s full case library without significantly degrading performance. This indicates that the completeness of the model-based knowledge used for matching and adaptation is more important to CAI~MA’s performance than the coverage of the case library.