Green icon of a presentation board with a pie chart and text lines on a tripod stand.

Published: 2022

Primary Author: Hal Stern

Research Area:

Presenter: Hal Stern
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, University of California, Irvine
Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine
Co-Director, CSAFE

Presentation Description:
In this four-part short course, Dr. Hal Stern introduces fundamental concepts from probability and statistics –– motivated by forensic issues –– followed by a detailed investigation of how they apply to assess forensic evidence’s probative value.

Sessions include topics such as:

  • Definition and interpretation of probability
  • Basic laws of probability
  • Conditional probability and independence of events
  • Bayes’ Theorem and Bayesian statistics
  • Variability and its sources
  • Populations and samples
  • Estimations of populations quantities
  • Hypothesis and equivalence testing
  • Two-stage approach to assessing forensic evidence
  • Likelihood ratio approach

 

Course Materials:
Session One Slides
Session Two Slides
Session Three Slides
Session Four Slides

Session One Recording:

Session Two Recording:

Session Three Recording:

Session Four Recording:


Related Resources

A thick gray wavy line forming an abstract, looping shape on a light gray background.

An Introduction to the Forensic Handwriting Analysis Software handwriter

July 18, 2025

Blue shoeprint with a tread pattern on a white background.

Forensic Footwear: A Retrospective of the Development of the MANTIS Shoe Scanning System

July 10, 2025

There currently are no shoe-scanning devices developed in the United States that can operate in a real-world, variable-weather environment in …

A green fingerprint icon on a light gray background.

Examiner consistency in perceptions of fingerprint minutia rarity

July 10, 2025

Friction ridge examiners (FREs) identify distinctive features (minutiae) in fingerprints and consider how rare these observed minutiae are in their …