A formal approach to qualifying and quantifying the ‘goodness’ of forensic identification decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we review and analyse common understandings of the degree to which forensic inference of source—also called identification or individualization—can be approached with statistics and is referred to, increasingly often, as a decision. We also consider this topic from the strongly empirical perspective of PCAST (2016) in its recent review of forensic science practice. We will point out why and how these views of forensic identification as a decision, and empirical approaches to it (namely experiments by multiple experts under controlled conditions), provide only descriptive measures of expert performance and of general scientific validity regarding particular forensic branches (e.g. fingermark examination). Although relevant to help assess whether the identification practice of a given forensic field can be trusted, these empirical accounts do not address the separate question of what ought to be a sensible, or ‘good’ in some sense, (identification-)decision to make in a particular case. The latter question, as we will argue, requires additional considerations, such as decision-making goals. We will point out that a formal approach to qualifying and quantifying the relative merit of competing forensic decisions can be considered within an extended view of statistics in which data analysis and inference are a necessary but not sufficient preliminary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.092 | 0.203 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".