During the last years there has been a growing need of developing innovative tools that can help small to medium sized enterprises to predict business failure as well as financial crisis. In this study we present a novel hybrid intelligent system aimed at monitoring the modus operandi of the companies and predicting possible failures. This system is implemented by means of a neural-based multi-agent system that models the different actors of the companies as agents. The core of the multi-agent system is a type of agent that incorporates a case-based reasoning system and automates the business control process and failure prediction. The stages of the case-based reasoning system are implemented by means of web services: the retrieval stage uses an innovative weighted voting summarization of self-organizing maps ensembles-based method and the reuse stage is implemented by means of a radial basis function neural network. An initial prototype was developed and the results obtained related to small and medium enterprises in a real scenario are presented.

Business Intelligence has gained relevance during the last years to improve business decision making. However, there is still a growing need of developing innovative tools that can help small to medium sized enterprises to predict risky situations and manage inefficient activities. This article present a multiagent system especially conceived to detect risky situations and provide recommendations to the internal auditors of SMEs. The core of the multiagent system is a type of agent with advanced capacities for reasoning to make predictions based on previous experiences. This agent type is used to implement an evaluator agent specialized in detect risky situations and an advisor agent aimed at providing decision support facilities. Both agents incorporate innovative techniques in the stages of the CBR system. An initial prototype was developed and the results obtained related to small and medium enterprises in a real scenario are presented.

Firms need a control mechanism in order to analyse whether they are achieving their goals. A tool for the decision support process has been developed on the basis of a multi-agent system that incorporates a casebased reasoning (CBR) system and automates the business control process. The CBR system automates the organization of cases and the retrieval stage by means of a maximum likelihood Hebbian learning-based method, an extension of the principal component analysis that groups similar cases, identifying clusters automatically in a data set in an unsupervised mode. The system has been tested in 10 small and medium companies in the textile sector, located in the northwest of Spain and the results obtained have been very encouraging.

In recent years, machine learning and data mining fields have found a successful application area in the field of DNA microarray technology. Gene expression profiles are composed of thousands of genes at the same time, representing complex relationships between them. One of the well-known constraints specifically related to microarray data is the large number of genes in comparison with the small number of available experiments or cases. In this context, the ability of identifying an accurate gene selection strategy is crucial to reduce the generalization error (false positives) of state-of-the-art classification algorithms. This paper presents a reduction algorithm based on the notion of fuzzy gene expression, where similar (co-expressed) genes belonging to different patients are selected in order to construct a supervised prototype-based retrieval model. This technique is employed to implement the retrieval step in our new gene-CBR system. The proposed method is illustrated with the analysis of microarray data belonging to bone marrow cases from 43 adult patients with cancer plus a group of three cases corresponding to healthy persons.

Small to medium enterprises require an internal control mechanism in order to monitor their modus operandi and to analyse whether they are achieving their goals. A tool for the decision support process has been developed based on a case-based reasoning system that automates the internal control process. The objective of the system is to facilitate the process of internal auditing. The system analyses the data that characterises each one of the activities carried out by the firm, then determines the state of each activity, calculates the associated risk, detects the erroneous processes, and generates recommendations to improve these processes. The developed model is composed of two case-based reasoning systems. One is used to identify the activities that may be improved and the other to determine how the activities could be improved. Each of the two subsystems uses a different problem solving method in each of the steps of the reasoning cycle. The system has been tested in 22 small and medium companies in the textile sector, located in the northwest of Spain during the last 39 months and the results obtained have been very encouraging.