A Quantitative Comparison of the Performance of Likelihood Ratio Systems in Trace-Reference Problems

A Quantitative Comparison of the Performance of Likelihood Ratio Systems in Trace-Reference Problems

Versteegh, Wouter (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Fokkink, R.J. (mentor)
Parolya, N. (graduation committee)
Ypma, R.J.F. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Applied Mathematics

2024-05-08

In forensic science, the strength of evidence is calculated mainly by statistical models called likelihood ratio systems. In court cases, the specific-source likelihood ratio system is used by forensic scientists to determine if a trace originates from a known reference, called the trace-reference problem. However, collecting sufficient data to create a specific source model may be time-consuming and costly. If the number of court cases becomes too high this could be problematic. Therefore there is a need for other models that can perform as well as a specific-source model if it is infeasible.

A common-source model could be a solution, as this model can be re-used over cases. To this end, we introduce two common-source systems: a common-source feature-based system and a common-source score-based system. We compare their performance to a specific-source score-based system in a trace-reference setting. The simulations show that the common source feature-based method is the best-performing likelihood ratio system if the dimensionality is not too high, and the sources are equally variable. The analysis shows that the common-source score-based method can work as effectively as a specific-source score-based model in certain scenarios.

Additionally, we researched a preprocessor, known as percentile rank, which aims to consider typicality for score-based methods. For the common-source score-based system, using a percentile-rank preprocessor can improve the performance for large sample sizes, while considering the rarity of the measurements.

Likelihood ratio system
Forensic statistics
Common source
Specific source

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6bc63bac-8200-459c-9681-521e6f43daa5

Student theses

master thesis

© 2024 Wouter Versteegh