In general, cases capture knowledge and concrete experiences of specific situations. By exploiting case-based knowledge for characterizing a subgroup pattern, additional information about the subgroup objects can be provided. This paper proposes a case-based approach for characterizing and analyzing subgroup patterns: It presents techniques for retrieving characteristic factors and a set of corresponding cases for the inspection and analysis of a specific subgroup pattern. Then, the set of factors and cases are merged into prototypical cases for presentation to the user. Such an alternative view on the subgroup pattern provides important introspective information on the subgroup objects, that is, the cases covered by the subgroup description: Using drill-down techniques, the user can perform a detailed introspection of a subgroup pattern using prototypical pattern cases. Additionally, these enable a convenient retrieval of interesting (meta-)information associated with the respective ...