A comment on the PCAST report:skip the “match”/“non-match” stage

Abstract

This letter comments on the report “Forensic science in criminal courts: Ensuring scientific validity of feature-comparison methods” recently released by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The report advocates a procedure for evaluation of forensic evidence that is a two-stage procedure in which the first stage is “match”/“non-match” and the second stage is empirical assessment of sensitivity (correct acceptance) and false alarm (false acceptance) rates. Almost always, quantitative data from feature-comparison methods are continuously-valued and have within-source variability. We explain why a two-stage procedure is not appropriate for this type of data, and recommend use of statistical procedures which are appropriate.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.10.018
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
Additional Information: © 2016, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords: false alarm,forensic statistics,likelihood ratio,match/non-match,PCAST report,sensitivity to pressure and temperature,Pathology and Forensic Medicine
Publication ISSN: 0379-0738
Last Modified: 26 Feb 2024 08:20
Date Deposited: 10 Aug 2017 09:40
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Letter
Published Date: 2017-03-01
Published Online Date: 2016-10-26
Accepted Date: 2016-10-01
Authors: Morrison, Geoffrey Stewart (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-8608-8207)
Kaye, David H.
Balding, David J.
Taylor, Duncan
Dawid, Philip
Aitken, Colin G.G.
Gittelson, Simone
Zadora, Grzegorz
Robertson, Bernard
Willis, Sheila
Pope, Susan
Neil, Martin
Martire, Kristy A.
Hepler, Amanda
Gill, Richard D.
Jamieson, Allan
de Zoete, Jacob
Ostrum, R. Brent
Caliebe, Amke

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