Related papers: Commentary on Guyll et al. (2023): Misuse of Stati…
The forensic science community has increasingly sought quantitative methods for conveying the weight of evidence. Experts from many forensic laboratories summarize their findings in terms of a likelihood ratio. Several proponents of this…
Occasionally during the course of the human learning experience we are faced with an anomaly. An aberration of sorts, which try as we might, defies appropriate classification. The recent paper by Spiegelman et al.--Chemical and forensic…
In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a report questioning the scientific validity of many forensic methods including firearm examination. Firearm examination is a forensic tool used to help the court determine whether two…
In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration (OSC) (Nosek et al 2015) published a highly influential paper which claimed that a large fraction of published results in the psychological sciences were not reproducible. In this article we review…
Risk assessments to help inform criminal justice decisions have been used in the United States since the 1920s. Over the past several years, statistical learning risk algorithms have been introduced amid much controversy about fairness,…
Forensic experts use specialized training and knowledge to enable other members of the judicial system to make better informed and more just decisions. Factfinders, in particular, are tasked with judging how much weight to give to experts'…
Familiar statistical tests and estimates are obtained by the direct observation of cases of interest: a clinical trial of a new drug, for instance, will compare the drug's effects on a relevant set of patients and controls. Sometimes,…
This paper discusses different needs and approaches to establishing ``causation'' that are relevant in legal cases involving statistical input based on epidemiological (or more generally observational or population-based) information. We…
Statistical schools-such as Bayesianism and Frequentism-are often presented as competing frameworks, each claiming technical rigour and superiority. Frequentism emphasizes objective inferences through repeated sampling, while Bayesianism…
In many jurisdictions, forensic evidence is presented in the form of categorical statements by forensic experts. Several large-scale performance studies have been performed that report error rates to elucidate the uncertainty associated…
Klaassen in (Klaassen 2015) proposed a method for the detection of data manipulation given the means and standard deviations for the cells of a oneway ANOVA design. This comment critically reviews this method. In addition, inspired by this…
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…
In science and beyond, numbers are omnipresent when it comes to justifying different kinds of judgments. Which scientific author, hiring committee-member, or advisory board panelist has not been confronted with page-long "publication…
The paper "Evaluation of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey" [1] proposes a new, much shorter, version of the CLASS based on standard factor analysis. In this comment we explain why we believe the analysis that is used is…
In studies of discrimination, researchers often seek to estimate a causal effect of race or gender on outcomes. For example, in the criminal justice context, one might ask whether arrested individuals would have been subsequently charged or…
Matched case-control studies are commonly employed in epidemiological research for their convenience and efficiency. Analysis of secondary outcomes can yield valuable insights into biological pathways and help identify genetic variants of…
In observational studies of discrimination, the most common statistical approaches consider either the rate at which decisions are made (benchmark tests) or the success rate of those decisions (outcome tests). Both tests, however, have…
Many scholars have called for raising statistical hurdles to guard against false discoveries in academic publications. I show these calls may be difficult to justify empirically. Published data exhibit bias: results that fail to meet…
We believe that "all men are created equal". With the rise of the police shootings reported by media, more people in the U.S. think that police use excessive force during law enforcement, especially to a specific group of people. We want to…
There have been many claims in the media and a bit of respectable research about the causes of variation in firearm sales. The challenges for causal inference can be quite daunting. This paper reports an analysis of daily handgun sales in…