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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | e7-e9 |
Number of pages | 3 |
Journal | Forensic Science International |
Volume | 272 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2017 |
Keywords
- False alarm
- Forensic statistics
- Likelihood ratio
- Match/non-match
- PCAST report
- Sensitivity