Charles Ragin’s Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) used for linguistic summarizations

Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) is a methodology for obtaining linguistic summarizations from data that are associated with cases. It was developed by the eminent social scientist Prof. Charles C. Ragin, but has, as of this date, not been applied by engineers or computer scientists. Unlike more quantitative methods that are based on correlation, fsQCA seeks to establish logical connections between combinations of causal conditions and an outcome, the result being rules that summarize the sufficiency between subsets of all of the possible combinations of the causal conditions (or their complements) and the outcome. The rules are connected by the word OR to the output. Each rule is a possible path from the causal conditions to the outcome. This paper, for the first time, explains fsQCA in a very quantitative way, something that is needed if engineers and computer scientists are to use fsQCA.