| Abstract: | This article introduces abductive case‐based reasoning (CBR) and attempts to show that abductive CBR and deductive CBR can be integrated in clinical process and problem solving. Then it provides a unified formalization for integration of abduction, abductive CBR, deduction, and deductive CBR. This article also investigates abductive case retrieval and deductive case retrieval using similarity relations, fuzzy similarity relations, and similarity metrics. The proposed approach demonstrates that the integration of deductive CBR and abductive CBR is of practical significance in problem solving such as system diagnosis and analysis, and will facilitate research of abductive CBR and deductive CBR. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 20: 957–983, 2005. |
