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A comment on the PCAST report: Skip the "match"/"non-match" stage
Geoffrey Stewart Morrison1, David H Kaye2, David J Balding3
1Independent Forensic Consultant, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Adjunct Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Simons Foundation Visiting Fellow, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, England, United Kingdom.
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.
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