Abstract

This article establishes a statistical basis for an evidence-reporting strategy that interprets strength of evidence in terms of a reduction in the size of a pool of relevant conceptual objects. The strategy is motivated by debates in forensic science, wherein the pool would consist of sources of forensic material. An advantage of using the pool-reduction strategy is that it highlights uncertainty that cannot be resolved by empirical considerations. It is shown mathematically to reflect a nonstandard formulation of a Bayes factor, and to extend for use in problems of general quantitative inference. A number of conventions are proposed for full effectiveness of the strategy’s implementation in practice.

摘要

本文为证据报告策略建立了统计基础，该策略根据相关概念对象池大小的减少来解释证据强度。该策略受到法医学辩论的推动，其中池将由法医材料来源组成。使用池减少策略的一个优点是它突出了无法通过经验考虑来解决的不确定性。它在数学上显示为反映贝叶斯因子的非标准公式，并扩展用于一般定量推理问题。为了在实践中充分有效地实施该战略，提出了一些公约。