## 3 Experimental Section
### Case Representation Methods  
To compare and evaluate the different case representation methods, chronic patients' original data from the physical rehabilitation scenario are converted into the different representations. Point-based and series-based representations of Neptune are shown in Tables 2 and 3. In the point-based representation, only the prognosis of 30 patients out of 661 who suffered from SCI could be performed because of missing data. In Table 2, the values of _remunerative employment_ in years 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010 are 4, 3, 1 and 1, respectively. These values, encoded according to the _fine granularity_ are represented as D\({}_{\text{-1}}\)D\({}_{\text{-2}}\)S (See Table 3.) because the attribute decreases one level, then two levels and finally remains stationary. The values, encoded to the _medium granularity_, are represented as D.S according to the correspondence between fine and medium symbol granularities of Figure 4 and considering that a sequence of same symbols is summarized using just one instance of these symbols, _i.e._, D.D.S is written as D.S. Finally, in the _coarse granularity_, these values are encoded as DS. The most similar patient to [PERSON] is dependent on the _symbol granularity_ chosen. For example, the most similar patient to [PERSON] is [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] according to the fine, medium and coarse symbol granularity, respectively. However, there are cases in which the most similar case according to the three granularities is the same. One example is the case of [PERSON] and [PERSON], which are the most similar patients according to all symbol granularities; both of them have stationary values in most of their attributes and only data from two years are available. A weakness of Table 3 is the fact that only changes are considered and no values. This is solved in Table 4 by adding the value of the initial point. For instance, although the attribute _preparing meals_ is stationary for [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON]; [PERSON] and [PERSON] have complete difficulty while [PERSON] and [PERSON] have no difficulty. In order to include values in series-based representation, the first point level precedes the series of interval symbols. In Table 4, [PERSON] is the most similar person to [PERSON]. [PERSON] is an example of a person with the recommendation of _general social support services_, and the most similar person to her is [PERSON]. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Person, yearrecommendations**} & \multicolumn{4}{c|}{**Environmental**} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{**Activities and participation**} \\  & \multicolumn{4}{c|}{**factors**} & \multicolumn{4}{c|}{**Activities and participation**} \\ \cline{2-11}  & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{2-11}  & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ \hline Neptune, 2006 & 0 & 8 & 0 & 0 & 8 & 2 & 0 & 4 & 4 & 4 & 4 \\ \hline Neptune, 2007 & 0 & 8 & 0 & 0 & 8 & 2 & 0 & 4 & 4 & 4 & 3 \\ \hline Neptune, 2009 & 0 & 8 & 0 & 0 & 8 & 2 & 0 & 4 & 4 & 4 & 1 \\ \hline Neptune, 2010 & 0 & 8 & 0 & 0 & 8 & 3 & 0 & 4 & 4 & 4 & 1 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: [PERSON]’s recommendations of changes in activities, participation and environmental factors to improve his functioning in the point-based case representation. For more information about ICF codes and descriptions see [4].