The widespread international adoption of DNA technology in forensic science over the last twenty years or so has resulted in some standardised methods of data collection and data interpretation. The impetus generated by the systematic approach characteristic of forensic DNA has carried into other fields of forensic science, typically resulting in forensic scientists wondering whether the same approaches can be applied to their own specialisms. Workers in areas of forensic interest such as ballistics and trace evidence have for some time collected in a systematic manner data connected with those fields. However there are many more areas of forensic science which require large bodies of systematically collected data. Some of these areas are so rarely used in forensic science that the required data is not available, and for a few areas of evidence it is infeasible, if not impossible to collect suitable data.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education