Initial successes in the area of recommender systems have led to
considerable early optimism. However as a research community, we are
still in the early days of our understanding of these applications and
their capabilities. Evaluation metrics continue to be refined but we
still need to account for the relative contributions of the various
knowledge elements that play a part in the recommendation process. In
this paper, we make a fine-grained analysis of a successful case-based
recommendation approach, providing an ablation study of similarity
knowledge and similarity metric contributions to improved system
performance. In particular, we extend our earlier analyses to examine
how measures of interestingness can be used to identify and analyse
relative contributions of segments of similarity knowledge. We gauge
the strengths and weaknesses of knowledge components and discuss
future work as well as implications for research in the area.