Defining similarity measures: Top-down vs. bottom-up

Defining similarity measures is a crucial task when developing CBR applications. Particularly, when employing utility-based similarity measures rather than pure distance-based measures one is confronted with a difficult knowledge engineering task. In this paper we point out some problems of the state-of-the-art procedure to defining similarity measures. To overcome these problems we propose an alternative strategy to acquire the necessary domain knowledge based on a Machine Learning approach. To show the feasibility of this strategy several application scenarios are discussed and some results of an experimental evaluation for one of these scenarios are presented.