Related papers: Shining a Light on Forensic Black-Box Studies
In the US, `black box' studies are increasingly being used to estimate the error rate of forensic disciplines. A sample of forensic examiner participants are asked to evaluate a set of items whose source is known to the researchers but not…
Reviews conducted by the National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2016) concluded that the field of forensic firearm comparisons has not been demonstrated to be scientifically…
The persistent issue of wrongful convictions in the United States emphasizes the need for scrutiny and improvement of the criminal justice system. While statistical methods for the evaluation of forensic evidence, including glass,…
Over the past decade, the field of forensic science has received recommendations from the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the U.S. President's…
We investigate how the use of bullet comparison algorithms and demonstrative evidence may affect juror perceptions of reliability, credibility, and understanding of expert witnesses and presented evidence. The use of statistical methods in…
For several decades, legal and scientific scholars have argued that conclusions from forensic examinations should be supported by statistical data and reported within a probabilistic framework. Multiple models have been proposed to quantify…
This article examines the overlooked risk of false negative errors arising from eliminations in forensic firearm comparisons. While recent reforms in forensic science have focused on reducing false positives, eliminations--often based on…
This paper is about how we study statistical methods. As an example, it uses the random regressions model, in which the intercept and slope of cluster-specific regression lines are modeled as a bivariate random effect. Maximizing this…
A growing body of work makes use of probing to investigate the working of neural models, often considered black boxes. Recently, an ongoing debate emerged surrounding the limitations of the probing paradigm. In this work, we point out the…
Simulation studies are commonly used in methodological research for the empirical evaluation of data analysis methods. They generate artificial data sets under specified mechanisms and compare the performance of methods across conditions.…
Forensic science is usually taken to mean the application of a broad spectrum of scientific tools to answer questions of interest to the legal system. Despite such popular television series as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its…
Forensic science often involves the comparison of crime-scene evidence to a known-source sample to determine if the evidence and the reference sample came from the same source. Even as forensic analysis tools become increasingly objective…
Although researchers have found evidence contextual bias in forensic science, the discussion of contextual bias is currently qualitative. We formalize years of empirical research and extend this research by showing quantitatively how biases…
Probabilistic numerics casts numerical tasks, such the numerical solution of differential equations, as inference problems to be solved. One approach is to model the unknown quantity of interest as a random variable, and to constrain this…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Early studies of risk assessment algorithms used in criminal justice revealed widespread racial biases. In response, machine learning researchers have developed methods for fairness, many of which rely on equalizing empirical metrics across…
In recent years, the use of sophisticated statistical models that influence decisions in domains of high societal relevance is on the rise. Although these models can often bring substantial improvements in the accuracy and efficiency of…
For several decades, legal and scientific scholars have argued that conclusions from forensic examinations should be supported by statistical data and reported within a probabilistic framework. Multiple models have been proposed to quantify…
Since the National Academy of Sciences released their report outlining paths for improving reliability, standards, and policies in the forensic sciences NAS (2009), there has been heightened interest in evaluating and improving the…