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Case-based
Case-based reasoning and reasoning
electromagnetism-like method
in construction management
265
Aleksandar Kartelj
Department of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics, Received 10 June 2013
University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia, and Revised 23 December 2013
Accepted 2 January 2014
Nebojša Šurlan and Zoran Cekić
Faculty of Construction Management,
Union Nikola Tesla University, Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract
Purpose – The presented research proposes a method aimed to improve a case retrieval phase of the
case-based reasoning (CBR) system through optimization of feature relevance parameters, i.e. feature
weights.
Design/methodology/approach – The improvement is achieved by applying the metaheuristic
optimization technique, called electromagnetism-like algorithm (EM), in order to appropriately adjust
the feature weights used in k-NN classifier. The usability of the proposed EM k-NN algorithm is much
broader since it can also be used outside the CBR system, e.g. for solving general pattern recognition
tasks.
Findings – It is showed that the proposed EM k-NN algorithm improves the baseline k-NN model and
outperforms the appropriately tuned artificial neural network (ANN) in the task of predicting the case
(data record) output values. The results are verified by performing statistical analysis.
Research limitations/implications – The proposed method is currently adjusted to deal with
numerical features, so, as a direction for future work, the variant of EM k-NN algorithm that deals with
symbolic or some more complex types of features should be considered.
Practical implications – EM k-NN algorithm can be incorporated as a case retrieval
component inside a general CBR system. This is the future direction of the investigation since the
authors intend to build a complete specialized CBR system for construction project management.
The overall CBR with incorporated EM k-NN will have significant implication in the construction
management as it will be able to produce more accurate prediction of viability and the life cycle of new
construction projects.
Originality/value – The electromagnetism-like algorithm is applied to the problem of finding
feature weights for the first time. EM potential for solving the problem of weighting features lies in its
internal structure because it is based on the real-valued EM vectors. The overall EM k-NN algorithm is
applied on data sets generated from real construction projects data corpus. The proposed algorithm
proved its efficiency as it outperformed baseline k-NN model and ANN. Its applicability in more
complex and specialized CBR systems is high since it can be easily added due to its modular
(black-box) design.
Keywords Project management, Information systems, Operational research, Optimization techniques,
Case-based reasoning, k-nearest neighbours
Paper type Research paper
Kybernetes
Vol. 43 No. 2, 2014
pp. 265-280
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This work is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, 0368-492X
Republic of Serbia, under Grant Number 174010. DOI 10.1108/K-06-2013-0105
K 1. Introduction
43,2 Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a general problem-solving concept that utilizes previously
experienced situations (cases) when dealing with new ones. The process of solving a given
case consists of finding a similar case(s) from the past and adapting it (them) to the new
conditions. This approach is an alternative to rule-based systems where it is sometimes
difficult or even impossible to formulate rules, and later adjust them when acquiring new
266 information. Most CBR systems consist of several subsystems that deal with problems of
the case acquirement, representation, indexing, retrieving and adjusting to new situations.
For detailed review about general CBR methodologies, the reader is referred to Aamodt
and Plaza (1994) and Watson and Marir (1994).
CBR is a widely spread concept, used throughout different scientific disciplines,
industry, agriculture, medicine, etc. Since its beginning, the CBR has been continuously
upgraded, improved and hybridized with many other problem-solving methodologies.
The most appealing areas for improving CBR are artificial intelligence and data mining.
Although there is a large number of different approaches based on these techniques, we
mention only several relevant efforts. In Beddoe and Petrović (2006), the CBR is used to
model the nurse rostering decisions. The CBR is enhanced by the genetic algorithm (GA)
in order to select and weigh the features of CBR data set. The authors showed that the
proposed technique reduces the number of features needed to be stored and significantly
improves the accuracy of CBR. Similarly, in Ahn and Kim (2009), the authors propose an
improved CBR model for the prediction of corporate bankruptcies. The improvement
is based on the simultaneous optimization of feature weights and a subset of selected
cases in the CBR data set. This is done by applying an appropriatelly encoded GA.
The experimental results showed the increase in prediction accuracy of this model
compared to conventional CBR systems. There is a large number of papers that consider
certain analysis or application of artificial neural network (ANN) in the context of CBR
system. ANN is sometimes used as an opposed (comparison) model, and sometimes it is
hybridized with CBR. In a conventional CBR system, for a given new instance, a subset
of related instances is first selected, and then the case adjustment is made based on those
instances. In ANN, on the contrary, the selection phase is hidden inside the complex and
non-intuitive network of weights, and only the final result, i.e. the expected case
adjustment, is obtained as an output. One of the first comparison-based papers on this
subject is made by Finnie et al. (1997), where the project management problem of
controlling time and budget in software projects is modelled by regression, ANN, and
CBR models. In Kim et al. (2004), a very similar comparison is made in the context of
construction management, where instead of software development costs, construction
costs are estimated. Chang et al. (2012a) propose a method that hybridizes CBR and ANN
in order to forecast a product unit cost for a new mobile phone based on the historical
database of previous phones. The method showed to be more accurate in comparison to
five different prediction models. Rough set theory (RST) is yet another concept that
found its application in decision support systems. In Ćirović and Cekić (2002), the
authors propose the usage of an integrated CBR and RST approach in the preliminary
design phase of the construction project. Huang and Tseng (2004) propose a CBR system
that uses RST, and that way significantly reduces the computational complexity of the
case similarity testing.
One of the most important elements of CBR is the case retrieval (selection) phase.
This phase usually depends on the case similarity scheme that defines to which degree
two given cases are similar. It is difficult to formulate the similarity scheme solely Case-based
by using expert, i.e. domain knowledge. Therefore, automated approaches in building reasoning
or improving similarity mechanisms are used in literature. Detailed and taxonomical
overview of similarity metrics used in CBR systems is made by Cunningham
(2009). The author separates the similarity (distance) mechanisms into: direct,
transformation-based, information-theoretic, and emergent. As we are interested in
adoption and improvement of a direct similarity mechanism, the other three approaches 267
will not be investigated throughout our paper. In the context of direct similarity
mechanisms, CBR is in its simplistic form viewed as a nearest neighbor (NN) classifier
(Cover and Hart, 1967). This is due to the fact that the goal of retrieval phase of CBR
system is finding the case that is the most similar to the given one (the new case). In order
to measure the nearness of the case, different distance metrics are used: manhattan,
Euclidean, overlapping similarity, etc. The natural extension of the NN is k-nearest
neighbors (k-NN). Instead of using only one neighbor, k neighbors are found and then,
by using various combining techniques (voting, averaging, etc.), the output case
prototype that corresponds to the input case is built. For illustration purposes, we give a
simple example in Figure 1. It shows the new case represented as a romb, and cases with
known class, circle or square. Based on the Euclidean distance measure in the
two-feature space, the new case NNs are one square and two circles. Therefore,
if voting-based scheme is to be adopted, the new case would be classified as a circle.
The Euclidean distance sometimes fails to achieve high accuracy when used within k-NN
since it gives the same importance to all features. The weighted Euclidean distance between
two cases x and y (or more generally two vector of features, x, y [ R N ) is given as follows:
!1=2
XN
2
d x; y ¼ wi ðxi 2 yi Þ
i¼1
Feature 2

Figure 1.
Classifying the new case
based on 3-NN
Feature 1
K where xi and yi denote values of i-th features of vectors P x and y, while wi is the weight
assigned to the i-th feature, such that 0 # wi # 1, and Ni¼1 wi ¼ 1. Setting the weights in
43,2 the above expression can represent a difficult task, and requires appropriately integrated
optimization technique within k-NN overall framework. Some previous efforts on the subject
of setting the feature weights within CBR framework have already been mentioned in the
introduction part. These are the GAs proposed by Beddoe and Petrović (2006) and Ahn and
268 Kim (2009). Im and Park (2007) suggest a CBR-based expert system for personalization
where ANN is used to weight the features. The authors adjusted the system to deal with
features from the symbolic domain by adopting the value difference metric as a distance
function. In Lin and Chen (2011), the authors propose CBR approach combined with an
artificial immune system algorithm (AISCBR). They empirically show that the usage of
AISCBR in tasks of parameter tuning, selecting and weighting the features increases the
classification accuracy of the underlying CBR. Three hybrid models for feature weighting
and classification are proposed in Chang et al. (2012b). They are based on particle swarm
optimization (PSO), GA and k-means clustering. The quality of these three models was
evaluated through binary classification tasks on medical diagnostics data sets.
Our work deals with the application of electromagnetism-like metaheuristic (EM) for the
feature weighting task inside k-NN. Unlike discretely coded metaheuristic algorithm, the
electromagnetism-like algorithm uses real coded representation, which seems to have a
higher potential for solving the problems where a coding representation is based on real
numbers. Additional strength of EM is a relatively simple control parameter structure which
allows it to be robust and customizable when dealing with various problems from global and
discrete optimization. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we introduce
the EM algorithm for weighting features within k-NN; in Section 3, the experimental results
of the proposed method and their comparison to methods from literature are presented;
while the final, Section 4, holds the conclusions and directions for future work.

2. EM k-NN
Electromagnetism-like (EM) method is a population-based metaheuristic for global
optimization. It is proposed in Birbil and Fang (2003), while its convergence properties
are established in Birbil et al. (2004). Recently, several NP-hard optimization problems
were successfully solved by applying EM-like algorithms. Some of these problems are:
the unicost set covering problem (Naji-Azimi et al., 2010), the uncapacitated multiple
allocation hub location problem (Filipović, 2011), automatic detection of circular shapes
embedded into cluttered and noisy images (Cuevas et al., 2012), feature selection
problem (Su and Lin, 2011), maximum set splitting problem (Kratica, 2013), strong
minimum energy topology problem (Kartelj, 2013), maximum betweenness problem
(Filipović et al., 2013), support vector machine (SVM) parameter tuning problem
(Kartelj et al., 2013), etc.
The population of EM consists of P particles (points) denoted by p i, i ¼ 1, . . . , P,
where p i [ [0,1] N ( N refers to the problem dimension). Each EM particle p i encodes
a single candidate solution, i.e. one constellation of weights w i ¼ ðwi1 ; . . . ; wiN )
used by weighted k-NN classifier. This is done by the assignment:
P
wji :¼ pji = Nk¼1 pki ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N , i.e. each weight is assigned with a value of
associate coordinate of EM point that is additionally scaled to satisfy the property:
PN i
k¼1 wk ¼ 1. Particles are awarded with a certain amount of charge based on the
quality of the solution they encode, i.e. better solution particles have higher charge. The Case-based
exact relationship between particles is given by Coulomb’s Law, which means that the reasoning
power of connection between two particles will be proportional to the product of
charges and reciprocal to the distance between them. The outline of EM method is
given in Figure 2.
The first step of EM is the generation of P initial solutions. As there are no constraints
on the values of weight components (each can take any value from [0,1]), every weight 269
combination, after it is being scaled, produces a feasible solution. Therefore, EM points
are randomly sampled from [0,1] N.
The main loop of algorithm iterates Nit times and in each iteration all P solution
particles are evaluated through the objective function calculation. The objective function
measures the quality of the underlying solution to the problem. The value of the
objective function for a given particle is later used to obtain the charge of that particle.
After all charges are assigned, the force vector between each pair of particles is
calculated. This pairwise force vectors are then aggregated and the resulting force of
each EM particle is used to direct its movement. The expected effect of the overall
process is to move the solution search process toward the regions with better solution
material, and at the same time, to avoid trapping in the regions of local optima. In the
following subsections each relevant aspect of the EM algorithm for weighted k-NN is
presented in more details.

START
Control parameters:
P, Nit

Generate P random
N-dimensional particles

Is Nit iteration Use the best particle to

Yes
reached generate solution

No

Move particles Evaluate each particle Print solution

Calulate charges and Figure 2.

END EM algorithm outline
forces
K 2.1 Objective function
43,2 The objective function represents a calculation that produces a measure of EM point
quality based on the underlying solution encoded by that point. Choosing an adequate
objective function is very problem-specific and has a vital impact on the solution search
process. The natural choice for the objective function, when dealing with prediction
problems, is the estimation of the error that the predictor will make when applied on
270 future data records. Since the future data is unknown when the predictor is being built,
it is a widely accepted approach to test the predictor quality by calculating the prediction
error on a test set. The test set is obtained by extracting certain records from the original
data set, while the rest of data, i.e. training data, is used to build a predictor. There are
many variations in regards to the sizes of training and testing sets, the evaluation
metrics used during the training and testing phase, and certain other aspects. The
objective function is concerned with the training phase of the algorithm, so it was
necessary to come up with an appropriate metric based on the training data set.
The straight-forward metric is simply the training error, obtained by using all training
data when training the predictor, and at the end averaging the error across all data records.
This approach usually suffers from the data overfitting issues, and achieves low quality
when applied to the testing data set. Therefore, the approaches that use internal validation
sets inside the training set are preferred. Leave-one-out (LOO) estimation is done by
removing each training vector from the training set, building a classifier, and then testing
the removed vector. The overall estimation of the prediction error is at the end calculated
as a sum of errors for all removed training vectors. It was shown that LOO gives almost
unbiased estimation of the expected generalization error (Luntz and Brailovsky, 1969).
The relaxed version of LOO is a k-fold cross-validation estimation. It is assessed by
splitting the training set into k folds, and later using each fold as a validation set, while the
remaining folds are used in the training phase. The average error across k validation sets is
then used as evaluation metric, i.e. objective function value.
In the first experiment where a classification on medical databases is performed,
we used a 10 £ 4 cross-validation technique to calculate the objective function. This
means that fourfold cross-validation is performed ten times with differently split folds,
and, at the end, the objective function is calculated as an average of these ten values. In
the second experiment, where the case retrieval for construction project management is
performed, the objective function is based on the LOO.
For a given EM particle p i, and for each training record, k-NN algorithm, in which
i
w set of weights is set, is performed. In the first experiment, the output of k-NN
algorithm is single value, which represents the predicted class label. As binary
classification tasks are being considered, the class label takes only one of two possible
values. In order to predict a value for a given record, a voting scheme for k-NN is used.
This means that the predicted class is equal to a majority class in k-NN records.
A classification error for a single record takes value of 0 if the predicted output (class),
denoted by o, is equal to actual output denoted by ao, and value of 1, otherwise.
Classification error for one fold splitting is calculated by dividing the sum of errors for all
training records by the total number of training records. As previously mentioned,
splitting is done ten times, after which, an average is set to be the objective value. In the
second experiment, the prediction output is not a single value, but an M-dimensional
vector of values (Figure 3). This predicted output vector is calculated by averaging
output vectors of k-NNs. Afterward, the prediction error of a single training data record
 N M Case-based
reasoning

271
neighbor 1

i-th record
T

neighbor (k-1)

neighbor k

Figure 3.
LOO estimation for k-NN

is calculated as a mean squared error of the output vector (vector of decision variables):
P
MSE i ¼ M 2
i¼1 ðoi 2 aoi Þ =M , where oi and aoi represent predicted and actual values at
the i-th output feature, respectively. The objective function is finally calculated as an
P
average of mean squared error across all T training records: MSE ¼ Ti¼1 MSE i =T.

2.2 Charges and forces

The charge of the i-th EM point, denoted by q i is calculated as a function of the solution
quality it encodes. High quality solutions are awarded with high charge:
0 1
i best
p obj 2 pobj
q i ¼ exp@ 2N P
A
P k best
k¼1 pobj 2 p obj

The motivation for this relation comes from the observation that the good solution
points should attract other points towards themselves. This, as a consequence, produces
a gradual movement of the search to perspective search regions. The force vector
produced by the i-th particle (denoted by F i ) is calculated by the following formula:
8 P
> X qi £ qj
>
> ðp j 2 p i Þ ; pjobj , piobj
>
> 2
>
< j¼1;j–i j
kp 2 p ki

Fi ¼
>
> X P
qi £ qj
>
> ðp i 2 p j Þ ; pjobj $ piobj
>
> 2
: j¼1;j–i j
kp 2 p ki

This formula is similar to the Coulomb’s Law in a sense that the force between every two
particles is proportional to the product of their charges and inversely proportional to
their distances. Finally, when all the force vectors are calculated, the movement
procedure is applied. The k-th coordinate of i-th EM point is adjusted according to the
following relation:
 8
K Fi   i
>
< pik þ l kF ki k 1 2 pik ; F k . 0
43,2 pik ¼ i
>
: pik þ l kFF ki k pik ; F ik # 0

The movement intensity denoted by l is randomly sampled from [0,1] in each iteration of
272 the main algorithm and for each EM point. The F ik denotes the k-th feature of the force
vector associated to p i.

3. Experimental evaluation
In this section we provide the evidence of the quality of the proposed method. The
experimental evaluation is concerned with two separate experiments. In the first,
EM k-NN is used for binary classification while the second applies EM k-NN for the
case retrieval. The EM k-NN method is implemented in C programming language and
compiled with the Visual Studio 2010 compiler. Tests were carried out on the Intel i5
2430M@2.4 GHz. All data sets and results are available on the following address:
www.matf.bg.ac.rs/, kartelj/download/emcbr.zip

3.1 Experiment 1
For this experiment, two medical diagnostics data sets from UCI Machine Learning
Repository (Bache and Lichman, 2013) are used: liver disorder and Wisconsin breast
cancer. The liver disorders data set consists of 345 records and seven features. The first
five features are all blood tests which are thought to be sensitive to liver disorders that
might arise from excessive alcohol consumption. The sixth feature represents a number
of half-pint equivalents of alcoholic beverages per day. This feature is, however, not used
in the classification process. Instead, the seventh feature that takes two values
depending on whether a number of drinks was higher than five is used as a class
attribute in the classification process. Wisconsin breast cancer data set consists of
569 records, each having 32 features. Since the first feature is an identification number of
a record it is excluded from the consideration. The next feature is a class variable
representing whether the record corresponds to a benign or a malignant case. The rest of
the 30 features are computed from a digitized image of a fine needle aspirate (FNA) of a
breast mass, and they describe characteristics of the cell nuclei present in the image.
The proposed EM k-NN for feature weighting is compared to three hybrid models for
classification with feature weighting, proposed in Chang et al. (2012b). The comparison
is done in terms of classification error (or classification accuracy). The first of these
models, called PSO clustering, combines the PSO technique and k-means clustering.
The second, named CBRPSO, improves the first model by introducing CBR algorithm to
determine the feature weights. Finally, the third model, called GA-CBRPSO, uses the
weights determined by CBR algorithm as initial weights in GA, and further evolves
these weights in order to improve the overall classification accuracy. Beside these three
algorithms, we compared the proposed algorithm to other comparison algorithms
described in Chang et al. (2012b): SVM, k-NN, Naı̈ve Bayes and fuzzy decision tree
classification method (FDT).
Experimental setup for comparison to these models is the same as in Chang et al.
(2012b): the population size P ¼ 20, while the maximum number of algorithm
iterations Nit ¼ 100. 75 percent of the original data set is used for training, while the
rest is reserved for testing. For both data sets, EM is evaluated 500 times with different Case-based
pseudo-random number generator initial values, i.e. different splitting of training and reasoning
testing part. Averages of these 500 values are later used to compare the EM algorithm
to other comparison algorithms.
Table I shows the overall comparison results expressed in terms of percentage
classification errors. All columns except the last one represent the previous results from
literature described in Chang et al. (2012b). The last column named EM 5-NN is the 273
proposed algorithm in which k (number of neighbors) is set to 5. The value for k was
determined empirically by testing different candidate values: k ¼ 1, k ¼ 3, . . . , k ¼ 11.
It can be seen from Table I that EM 5-NN is better in terms of average classification
error than six out of seven comparison methods, including two out of three methods
proposed in Chang et al. (2012b), PSO and CBRPSO. Only GA-CBRPSO is better than
EM 5-NN in terms of average error on both data sets. However, EM 5-NN is better
when the best found solutions are compared. Therefore, it can be concluded that EM
5-NN outperforms six out of seven comparison methods and achieves comparable
results when compared to GA-CBRPSO.

3.2 Experiment 2
Data corpus for the second experiment is assessed through construction project
management study about project knowledge database decision support system that
utilizes value parameters (VP) and critical success factors (CSF) (Šurlan, 2013). Figure 4
shows the general overview of this study.
EM k-NN is the implementation of the fifth phase of the overall framework
introduced by Šurlan (2013), i.e. it considers the selection of the best suited/similar
projects for a given project. Details regarding the other phases of the proposed CBR
system are out of the scope of this paper, but in order to give systematic introduction
about the data collection, we give a brief description about the third phase. In the third
step, the database of completed construction projects is formed. The database is built
through questionnaire survey. In a particular consultancy company, a total of
1,123 projects were available with 450 identified project managers. Out of this number,
263 were contacted, and 142 responded with sufficient data to be included in the
database. The VP entered the database as input features, while the CSF were used as
output features later in the application of EM k-NN algorithm. There are six VP (n ¼ 6)
posed in a form of requirements:
(1) maximize business effectiveness;
(2) ensure effective project management and delivery;

Data set SVM KNN Naı̈ve Bayes FDT PSO CBR-PSO GA-CBRPSO EM 5-NN

Liver disorder
Best 22.4 26.3 29.8 31.7 28.5 26.1 21.8 19.5
Average 30.7 38.9 40.8 39.9 37.5 31.6 23.2 31.4 Table I.
Lowest 36.8 45.2 41.9 41.3 49.6 47.9 45.8 48.3 Comparison of EM 5-NN
Breast cancer and several algorithms
Best 1.9 3.1 8.6 8.8 7.6 6.2 2.1 1.4 from literature with
Average 6.8 10.2 12.4 13.8 9.7 7.4 2.6 5.3 respect to percentage
Lowest 18.7 19.9 14.7 21.1 11.6 9.2 3.7 10.5 classification error
K
43,2

274

Figure 4. Source: Diagram taken from Šurlan (2013)

CBR study overview
 (3) achieve the required financial performance; Case-based
(4) minimize building operation and maintenance costs, and environmental impact; reasoning
(5) impact positively on the location of the facility; and
(6) comply with third party requirements.

There are eight CSF (M ¼ 8):

275
(1) scope;
(2) time;
(3) cost;
(4) quality;
(5) contract/administration;
(6) human resource;
(7) risk; and
(8) health and safety.

The marks for all of these 14 parameters (factors) were given by project managers on a
scale of 0-10. Therefore, the final data corpus consisted of 142 records with 14 numerical
features, out of which six represented input parameters (VP), and the other eight were
the output features (CSF). The essential assumption upon which the optimization
process succeeds on this data corpus is that appropriate weighting of input features
induces high predictive power regarding the MSE of the output features. More
specifically, we assume that, in general, construction projects with similar input
parameters produce similar output factors. Benchmark data sets are generated from
this data corpus by using random sampling. The pseudo-random number generator is
applied ten times with different seed value in order to generate ten different splits of
the original data set to training and testing part. The ratio between the training and
testing part is 2:1. The motivation for using multiple divisions of the original data
comes from the necessity for having credible comparison among different algorithms,
i.e. removing the notion of coincidence in judging which algorithm performs better.
Three algorithms are considered for the comparison. The first one is a basic k-NN
algorithm (k-NN), where each input feature is treated equally. The second is the proposed
EM k-NN. The last one is an ANN (Matlab implementation). In order to perform a fair
comparison, the parameters of k-NN and ANN are tuned in such way that all algorithms
achieve their maximal performances. This is done by finding the values of k and
h (neurons in the hidden layer) that minimize MSE of kN-N and ANN, respectively.
Table II shows the dependency between the parameter k and MSE of the EM k-NN.
The last row shows the mean rank for different values of k. This measure is obtained
by ranking all EM k-NN algorithms (EM for different values of k) across all data sets.
For a fixed data set, the best performing algorithm is awarded rank 1, the next best
rank 2, etc. The mean rank is finally obtained for each k by calculating the average of
ranks across all data sets. EM for k ¼ 5 and k ¼ 7 obtained the best mean rank of 2.8.
As only one EM k-NN model has to be selected for the comparison, we choose the simpler
model, i.e. the one where k equals 5. A similar procedure is done for the ANN algorithm.
Here, the number of neurons in the hidden layer (h) is varied. Figure 5 shows the changes
in average number of epochs, average best epoch and average MSE, as the number of
K
k¼1 k¼3 k¼5 k¼7 k¼9 k ¼ 11 k ¼ 13 k ¼ 15
43,2
cpm1 2.753 1.779 1.745 1.833 1.800 1.813 1.896 1.852
cpm2 2.805 2.279 2.233 2.363 2.308 2.332 2.383 2.453
cpm3 2.268 1.733 1.620 1.555 1.607 1.562 1.507 1.502
cpm4 3.497 2.670 2.509 2.403 2.527 2.484 2.526 2.499
276 cpm5 2.667 2.374 2.330 2.264 2.381 2.376 2.508 2.503
cpm6 2.417 2.116 1.916 1.888 2.041 1.996 2.054 2.091
cpm7 2.808 2.158 2.141 2.156 2.062 2.173 2.033 2.161
cpm8 2.389 1.984 1.830 1.664 1.859 1.767 1.711 1.779
Table II. cpm9 2.866 2.585 2.411 2.415 2.477 2.397 2.429 2.481
MSE for different values cpm10 3.118 1.978 2.043 2.132 2.091 2.217 2.142 2.181
of k in EM k-NN Mean rank 8.000 4.800 2.800 2.800 4.200 3.900 4.400 5.100

Figure 5.
Dependency of MSE,
number of epochs and
best epoch on number
of hidden neurons

hidden neurons rises. Here, the best epoch represents the epoch in which the lowest
MSE was found. It can be seen that the average best epoch is in all cases sufficiently
lower than the average number of performed epochs, therefore, it can be concluded
that the neural network was properly trained.
As Table III and Figure 5 show, the ANN performs the best when h is 1. In that case
the mean rank is 1.8.
The overall comparison is made among the following algorithms: 5-NN classifier,
EM 5-NN, and ANN that uses 1 neuron in the hidden layer. The results, presented
in Table IV, show that the proposed EM algorithm is superior to other two algorithms as
it produces the best result in nine out of ten cases. Although the comparison results
are self-authenticating, we wanted to verify them by appropriate statistical tests.
Demšar (2006) showed that, when comparing the classifiers over multiple data sets,
the non-parametric Friedman test should be preferred over ANOVA. The practical
implications of the Friedman test are simple computation and interpretation, as the
overall performances of tested algorithms are more intuitively and easily represented
 Case-based
h¼1 h¼5 h ¼ 10 h ¼ 15 h ¼ 20 h ¼ 25 h ¼ 30 h ¼ 35
reasoning
cmp1 2.814 2.275 4.810 10.487 8.298 7.512 16.448 19.997
cmp2 2.752 2.660 3.023 4.941 5.757 16.075 9.155 24.528
cmp3 2.490 3.496 2.612 3.829 8.662 9.484 6.846 6.789
cmp4 4.096 3.374 3.114 3.293 4.237 7.838 8.062 9.681
cmp5 3.547 3.115 3.771 3.290 2.337 4.767 8.062 3.931 277
cmp6 2.401 3.040 9.116 5.739 3.335 48.883 24.666 16.781
cmp7 2.820 2.924 5.605 9.854 21.552 8.487 17.892 7.658
cmp8 2.794 3.646 3.535 7.594 6.310 5.261 7.692 7.605
cmp9 3.230 3.550 3.972 10.947 12.847 12.397 9.276 13.713 Table III.
cmp10 2.709 3.379 3.714 4.762 4.549 5.640 12.009 16.681 MSE for different
Mean rank 1.800 2.100 3.000 4.500 5.000 6.100 6.700 6.800 values of h in ANN

5-NN EM 5-NN ANN (h ¼ 1)

cmp1 1.749 1.745 2.814

cmp2 2.381 2.233 2.752
cmp3 1.662 1.620 2.490
cmp4 2.555 2.509 4.096
cmp5 2.297 2.330 3.547
cmp6 1.962 1.916 2.401
cmp7 2.182 2.141 2.820 Table IV.
cmp8 1.915 1.830 2.794 Comparison of 5-NN,
cmp9 2.473 2.411 3.230 EM 5-NN and ANN
cmp10 2.158 2.043 2.709 algorithms with
Mean rank 1.900 1.100 3.000 respect to MSE

by ranks instead of dubious averages. The Friedman test showed that there was a
statistically significant difference in the classification error among the three considered
algorithms: x 2(2) ¼ 18.2, p ¼ 0.000 (,0.05). Post hoc Wilcoxon signed-rank test with
Bonferroni adjustment showed that there is a statistical difference between all three
algorithm pairs: EM 5-NN and 5-NN (z ¼ 2 2.599, p ¼ 0.009); EM 5-NN and ANN
(z ¼ 2 2.803, p ¼ 0.005); 5-NN and ANN (z ¼ 22.803, p ¼ 0.005). Based on this, one can
conclude that EM 5-NN outperforms both comparison algorithms, while the basic 5-NN
model is more successful than ANN.
The quality of the proposed method is demonstrated through application for two
different tasks: classification and case retrieval. Both tasks heavily relied on the inner
structure parameters of the k-NN, i.e. feature weighting coefficients. EM produced high
quality results in both cases, which demonstrated the applicability of the EM weight
selection method for various tasks. The presented results are a motivation for further
usage of the EM k-NN in CBR systems for different fields and not only construction project
management.

4. Conclusion
In this paper, an electromagnetism-like (EM) algorithm is applied for setting the feature
weights that are used within the k-NN algorithm. The real-valued representation of EM
K points showed to be suitable for this problem since the transformation to feature
43,2 weights is done through a simple scaling procedure. This tight relation between coded
and decoded domain allowed for smooth transition of the algorithm through search
space which consequently produces high quality weight combinations. Two
experimental evaluations confirmed the quality of the proposed method. In the first
experiment, EM k-NN is used for classification and compared to six methods from
278 literature. It was showed that EM k-NN is better than all the comparison methods,
except one. In the second experiment, the problem of case retrieval was considered. For
that purpose, data from the construction project management study are pre-processed,
and used as benchmarks in the evaluation of the proposed method. The results of EM
k-NN are compared to the basic k-NN algorithm and ANN. EM k-NN outperformed the
comparison methods in nine out of ten testing instances, which was later verified by
statistical significance testing. As a direction for future work, the variant of EM k-NN
algorithm that deals with symbolic and more complex types of features should be
considered. The second course of investigation is a building of a complete CBR system
for construction project management that applies the proposed EM k-NN in the case
retrieval phase.

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K About the authors
Aleksandar Kartelj is a PhD candidate at the Department of Informatics, Faculty of
43,2 Mathematics, University of Belgrade, where he also works as a Teaching Assistant. He is also
a Research Assistant at project “Mathematical Models and Optimization Methods for
Large-Scale Systems”, funded by Republic of Serbia, Ministry of Education, Science and
Technological Development, under Grant Number 174010. He published several scientific
articles on the subjects of combinatorial optimization, and metaheuristics. Aleksandar Kartelj is
280 the corresponding author and can be contacted at: kartelj@matf.bg.ac.rs
Nebojša Šurlan is a PhD candidate for management of sustainable development in construction,
a course he has started in 2010. He has over 16 years in practical work on construction projects and
project management. Nebojša is certified project management professional (PMP) since 2010. He is
currently a General Manager of the Building Directorate of Serbia.
Professor Zoran Cekić is a Chartered Builder, Certified Project Manager and Chartered
Surveyor. He holds MSc and PhD degrees in project management in construction from
University of Belgrade. Over the last few decades, he works as a Manager for complex projects in
South-East of Europe and Russia. He is former State Secretary (Deputy Minister) for national
infrastructure investments and Program Manager for infrastructure investment program
co-financed by European Investment Bank.

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