Why Fuzzy Cognitive Maps Are Efficient

Abstract

In many practical situations, the relation between the experts’ degrees of confidence in different related statements is well described by Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM). This empirical success is somewhat puzzling, since from the mathematical viewpoint, each FCM relation corresponds to a simplified one-neuron neural network, and it is well known that to adequately describe relations, we need multiple neurons. In this paper, we show that the empirical success of FCM can be explained if we take into account that human’s subjective opinions follow Miller’s seven plus minus two law.