Creating a Suicide Note Analysis Model Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

Suicide has become a significantly prominent issue because high frequencies of occurrences make it one of the top three causes of death for young people in the United States. To prevent suicide attempts, it is important to identify suicidal tendencies in the behavior, speech, or writing of an individual as early as possible. This paper demonstrates one technique of analyzing written material to determine whether or not a person is in a suicidal state. Word frequencies were examined from both suicide and non-suicide notes and translated into inputs to a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM). For the datasets examined, each set was correctly identified as suicidal or non-suicidal.