Chemometrics comes to court: evidence evaluation of chem-bio threat agent attacks

Forensic statistics is a well‐established scientific field whose purpose is to statistically analyze evidence in order to support legal decisions. It traditionally relies on methods that assume small numbers of independent variables and multiple samples. Unfortunately, such methods are less applicable when dealing with highly correlated multivariate data sets such as those generated by emerging high throughput analytical technologies. Chemometrics is a field that has a wealth of methods for the analysis of such complex data sets, so it would be desirable to combine the two fields in order to identify best practices for forensic statistics in the future. This paper provides a brief introduction to forensic statistics and describes how chemometrics could be integrated with its established methods to improve the evaluation of evidence in court. The paper describes how statistics and chemometrics can be integrated, by analyzing a previous know forensic data set composed of bacterial communities from fingerprints. The presented strategy can be applied in cases where chemical and biological threat agents have been illegally disposed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Forensic statistics is a well‐established scientific field whose purpose is to statistically analyse evidence in order to support legal decisions. It traditionally relies on methods that assume small numbers of independent variables and multiple samples. Unfortunately, such methods are less applicable when dealing with highly correlated multivariate data sets. This paper provides a brief introduction to forensic statistics and describes how chemometrics could be integrated with its established methods to improve the evaluation of evidence in court.