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Updated: Dec 12, 2025

An R-Based Landscape Validation of a Competing Risk Model
Published on: September 16, 2022
How can courts take into account the uncertainty in a likelihood ratio?
Duncan Taylor1, David Balding2
1School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100 Adelaide, SA, 5001, Australia; Forensic Science SA, PO Box 2790, Adelaide, SA, 5000, Australia.
Abstract:
As legal practitioners and courts become more aware of scientific methods and evidence evaluation, they are demanding measures of the reliability of expert opinion. In particular, there are calls for error rates to accompany opinion evidence in comparative forensic sciences. While error rates or confidence intervals can be useful for those disciplines that claim to identify the source of a trace, the call for these statistical tools has extended to sciences that present opinions in the form of a likelihood ratio. In this article we argue against presenting both a likelihood ratio and numerical measures of its uncertainty. We explain how the LR already encapsulates uncertainty. Instead we consider how sensitivity analyses can be used to guide the presentation of LRs that are informative to the court and not unfair to defendants.
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