Multidimensional Analysis of Deprivation and Fragility Patterns of Migrants in Lombardy, Using Partially Ordered Sets and Self-Organizing Maps

In this paper, we present a multidimensional fuzzy analysis of the levels and the patterns of poverty and social fragility of migrants’ families, in the Italian region of Lombardy, in year 2014. Migrants’ poverty emerges as a complex trait, better described as a stratification of nuanced patterns than in black and white terms; Lombard migrants are in fact affected, to different extents, by “a diffused sharing of deprivation facets” and cannot be trivially split into deprived and non-deprived. The paper employs innovative data analysis tools from the Theory of Partially Ordered Sets; compared to mainstream monetary approaches, this leads to more realistic estimates of poverty diffusion and eliminates some well-known biases of standard evaluation procedures, providing strong support to the use of partial order concepts and tools in social evaluation studies.