Homelessness Response Essay

Words: 435
Pages: 2

It is noted that many individuals, and even families, live in poverty due to factors such as unemployment, mental illness, sickness, and much more. However, though there are some stories of those who have over come poverty many stay stable in poverty or worse, become homeless altogether. As many can guess what can cause homelessness, what really does cause or impact one to become homeless? In the following article “Analyzing the Impact of Social Factors on Homelessness: A Fuzzy Cognitive Map Approach”, authors Mago et. al investigate the impact of homelessness by creating a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) which is a framework used for modeling interdependence between concepts in the real-world (2013). Overall, fuzzy logic (FL) is a multi-valued logic technique that is approximate and, instead of using traditional logic theory, it uses binary sets that have two-valued logic (Mago et. …show more content…
FCM’s, once completed, look like a web chart that connects certain factors to the overall problem to which it can determine is one specific cause does impact, for example, homelessness or anything else one would like to map out. For this specific study three cases were created to experiment a scenario that would most likely results in homelessness; 1) extreme case, most likely to end up homeless, 2) extreme case, less likely to end up homeless, and 3) middle case, better representing possibilities in real world with the cause of homelessness being unknown. Experimentation with the virtual common-sense model was conducted by researchers to ensure that it would perform as expected and reach a stable state after iterating prior to the input of the actual weight values (Mago, et. al, 2013). The following FCM is displayed above in fig. 1 and was created by the researches in this