Evaluation of distance‐based approaches for forensic comparison: Application to hand odor evidence

Isabelle Rivals (1, 2) , Cédric Sautier (3) , Guillaume Cognon (4) , Vincent Cuzuel (4)

1 UMRS 1158 - Neurophysiologie Respiratoire Expérimentale et Clinique
2 ESPCI Paris - Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris
3 IRCGN - Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale (Ministère de l'intérieur)
4 PJGN\IRCGN

The issue of distinguishing between the same-source and different-source hypotheses based on various types of traces is a generic problem in forensic science. This problem is often tackled with Bayesian approaches, which are able to provide a likelihood ratio that quantifies the relative strengths of evidence supporting each of the two competing hypotheses. Here, we focus on distance-based approaches, whose robustness and specifically whose capacity to deal with high-dimensional evidence are very different, and need to be evaluated and optimized. A unified framework for direct methods based on estimating the likelihoods of the distance between traces under each of the two competing hypotheses, and indirect methods using logistic regression to discriminate between same-source and different-source distance distributions, is presented. Whilst direct methods are more flexible, indirect methods are more robust and quite natural in machine learning. Moreover, indirect methods also enable the use of a vectorial distance, thus preventing the severe information loss suffered by scalar distance approaches. Direct and indirect methods are compared in terms of sensitivity, specificity and robustness, with and without dimensionality reduction, with and without feature selection, on the example of hand odor profiles, a novel and challenging type of evidence in the field of forensics. Empirical evaluations on a large panel of 534 subjects and their 1690 odor traces show the significant superiority of the indirect methods, especially without dimensionality reduction, be it with or without feature selection.

Mots clés: Bayesian inference; dissimilarity measure; forensic science; human hand odor; likelihood ratio; logistic regression; Bayesian inference dissimilarity measure forensic science human hand odor likelihood ratio logistic regression; Bayesian inference

Domaines: Apprentissage [cs.LG]

Isabelle Rivals, Cédric Sautier, Guillaume Cognon, Vincent Cuzuel. Evaluation of distance‐based approaches for forensic comparison: Application to hand odor evidence. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2021, 66 (6), pp.2208-2217. ⟨10.1111/1556-4029.14818⟩. ⟨hal-04018054⟩