Statistics and the Evaluation of Evidence for Forensic Scientists. Franco Taroni

Statistics and the Evaluation of Evidence for Forensic Scientists - Franco Taroni


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omission. The Leverhulme Trust, through grant number EM2016‐027, provided invaluable support for this work through the award of a research fellowship to one of us (CGGA) who also thanks the School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh for its support. FT thanks the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Fondation pour l'Université de Lausanne for their constant support of forensic research which has permitted the development of many parts of the book. He also thanks the School of Criminal Justice of the University of Lausanne for its support. SB thanks the University Ca' Foscari of Venice for its support.

      We also thank the staff at John Wiley and Sons Ltd for their help and support in bringing this project to fruition.

      Last, but by no means least, we thank our families for their support and encouragement.

      C.G.G. Aitken, F. Taroni and S. Bozza

      Edinburgh, Lausanne and Venice

      2020

       Preface to Second Edition

      In the Preface to the first edition of this book, it was commented that the role of statistics in forensic science is continuing to increase and that this was partly because of the debate continuing over DNA profiling which looked as if it would carry on into the foreseeable future. It now appears that the increase is continuing and perhaps at a greater rate than nine years ago. The debate over DNA profiling continues unabated. We have left the minutiae of this debate to others restricting ourselves to an overview of that particular topic. Instead, we elaborate on the many other areas in forensic science in which statistics can play a role.

      There may be different reasons for the obvious reluctance or scepticism connected with the adoption of Bayesian theory for presenting fibres evidence. These may include:

       a lack of awareness of the explanatory literature available;

       difficulty in understanding the proposals therein;

       an antagonistic mind‐set generated by an approach which is thought too complicated and too mathematical;

       not knowing how to apply Bayes Theorem in practical casework;

       criticism that case scenarios dealt with in the literature are over‐simplified and not realistic.

      (Grieve, 2001, p. 208)

      We hope that this book goes some way towards overcoming the reluctance and scepticism.

      Reference is made on occasion to probability values of statistical distributions. Rather than make reference to statistical packages and books of tables each time this is done, details of several packages are listed here instead:

      MINITAB. See http://www.minitab.com and Ryan et al. (2000).


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