Nonlinear cause-effect relationships in Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) have been widely used for a plethora of applications, exploiting its ability to represent the knowledge and the dynamics of a system. The diversity of inference mechanisms, which have been proposed until nowadays, discloses the effort for an effective concept value calculation methodology. In contrast with the most research efforts which consider a linear relation of the influence that a concept exercise to another concept, in this paper a nonlinear representation of that influence is introduced. The importance which is associated with the proposed methodology is that a nonlinear cause-effect relationship strengthens the behavior of an FCM through the simulation process. The analysis of this proposal through a progressive reasoning is followed by appropriately selected problems.