Preface

An increase in the danger from new forms of crime and the need by those who administer justice for higher standards of scientific work require the development of new methods for measuring the evidential value of physicochemical data obtained during the analysis of various kinds of trace evidence.

The physicochemical analysis of various types of evidence by the application of various analytical methods (Chapter 1) returns numerous types of information including multivariate quantitative data (Chapter 3, Appendix B), for example, concentrations of elements or the refractive index of a glass fragment. The role of the forensic expert is to evaluate such physicochemical data (evidence, E) in the context of two competing propositions H1 and H2 (Chapter 2, Appendix A). The propositions H1 and H2 may be put forward by the police, prosecutors, defenders or the courts and they concern:

  • comparison problems (Chapter 4), for example where H1 states that the glass samples being compared originate from the same object, and H2 that the glass samples being compared originate from different objects;
  • classification problems (Chapter 5), for example where H1 states that the glass sample which has been analysed originates from a car or building window, and H2 states that the glass sample analysed originates from a container glass.

Bayesian models have been proposed for the evaluation of the evidence in such contexts. Statistical analysis is used to evaluate the evidence. The value of the ...

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