Journal article
A comment on the PCAST report: Skip the “match”/“non-match” stage
GS Morrison, DH Kaye, DJ Balding, D Taylor, P Dawid, CGG Aitken, S Gittelson, G Zadora, B Robertson, S Willis, S Pope, M Neil, KA Martire, A Hepler, RD Gill, A Jamieson, J de Zoete, RB Ostrum, A Caliebe
Forensic Science International | ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD | Published : 2017
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, a..
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Awarded by Simons Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
This work was funded in-part by a fellowship awarded to Morrison by the Simons Foundation. Morrison, Balding, Dawid, Aitken, Robertson, Pope, Neil, Martire, Gill, Jamieson, de Zoete, and Caliebe would like to thank the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences for its hospitality during the program Probability and Statistics in Forensic Science which was supported by EPSRC Grant Number EP/K032208/1. All opinions expressed are those of the authors/signatories and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of any funding agencies or organizations with which they are affiliated.