FORDISC

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FORDISC is a software program created by Stephen Ousley and Richard Jantz. [1] It is designed to help forensic anthropologists investigate the identity of a deceased person by providing estimates of the person's size, ethnicity, and biological sex based on the osteological material recovered. It has been criticised for its low accuracy.

Contents

Features

FORDISC can estimate the sex, ancestry, and stature of a given skeleton via linear discriminant analysis of standard anthropometric measurements. Although created for use in forensic anthropology, many physical anthropologists are still using the program to determine the biological profile of skeletal remains that are considered archaeological in origin. However, the results acquired from such remains may be skewed, as FORDISC is primarily designed for modern populations, which may differ in some factors from historic ones. [2] The use of discriminant function analysis in FORDISC allows the user to sort individuals into specific groups that are defined by certain criteria. The discriminate function analysis "analyzes specific groups with known membership in discrete categories such as ancestry, language, sex, tribe or ancestry, and provides a basis for the classification of new individuals with unknown group membership." [3] FORDISC compares potential profiles to data contained in a database of skeletal measurements of modern humans. [4]

Databases

The data behind FORDISC largely originated from the Forensic Data Bank, which is contributed to by the University of Tennessee and other contributing institutions. [5] The Forensic Data Bank was created in 1986, through the use of a National Institute of Justice grant, and has gathered over 3400 cases. The Forensic Data Bank is a currently ongoing effort to record information about modern populations, primarily from forensic cases.

FORDISC's creators have also integrated W. W. Howells worldwide cranial data into the program, for the use of archaeological remains. Howell's craniometric data set consist of 2500 crania from 28 different populations around the world dating to the later Holocene, in which around 82 cranial measurements were obtained. [6]

Criticism

According to the authors of the program, some limitations should be taken into account when using this program. Some of these limitations include the fact that FORDISC will classify any unknown into the 'closest' group, this means that even if an individual's ethnic group or race is not represented in the database, the program will classify it to the 'closest' group. Another limitation involves classification using hybrid individuals and groups. The authors state that genetic exchange between groups can cause misclassifications due to gene overlap that can consist of two ancestral populations. Another limitation deal with the classification of individuals under the age of 18, this is due to the nature of physical anthropologists ability to assess age in subadults. However, the authors state that there are differences between subadults in different groups, but these differences tend to not correspond to differences seen in adults. Another limitation that the authors believe researchers should take into account is the fact that this program is based on measurements that are affected by "disease, disuse, treatment, or trauma." The measurement of affected bone(s) may produce inaccurate values, and therefore he classification will not reflect the correct population affinity. [7]

The last limitation deals with archaeological populations. This limitation is because most of the measurements in the data set that the classifications are based on in the program are from remains that are from the 20th century, and should not be used for classification of archaeological remains. This is because documented population differences and secular changes that have occurred throughout history. However, the inclusion of W. W. Howells craniometric data set has allowed researchers to classify archaeological remains because much of the data set comes from individuals from the 19th century. [7]

A 2009 study found that even in favourable circumstances, FORDISC 3.0 can be expected to classify no more than 1 per cent of specimens with confidence. The authors wrote, "even in favourable conditions—when the focal specimen's source population is present in the reference sample, the focal specimen is nearly complete and its sex is known—Fordisc has no more than a 1 per cent chance of success. There are several reasons for suspecting that even this may overstate Fordisc's usefulness." [8]

In 2012 research presented at the 81st Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists concluded that FORDISC ancestry determination was not always consistent, that the program does not perform to expectations and that it should be used with caution. [9]

On a sample of Spanish skulls, FORDISC demonstrated less than 50% accuracy, classifying some skulls as Black, Japanese or American Indian. [10]

List of Contributing Institutions to the Forensic Anthropology Data Bank

[11]

See also

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References

  1. ↑ "Dennis Dirkmaat publishes new book on forensic anthropology". Computer Weekly News. 31 May 2012. Archived from the original on 29 March 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  2. ↑ Armelagos, George J. (2003). "A Century of Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology: Contrasts, Contradictions, and Conflicts". American Anthropologist. 105 (1): 53–64. doi:10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.53.
  3. ↑ Ousley, Stephen; Jantz, Richard (2014). "Ch. 15: Fordisc 3 and Statistical Methods for Estimating Sex and Ancestry". In Dirkmaat, Dennis (ed.). A Companion to Forensic Anthropology. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 311–329.
  4. ↑ Ousley, S.D., and R.L. Jantz (2005) FORDISC 3.0: Personal Computer Forensic Discriminant Functions. University of Tennessee Archived 2008-07-05 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ↑ Kelly, John (14 September 2006). "Couple Fleshes Out Skeletons' Past". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 29 March 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  6. ↑ Howells, WW. (1995). Who's Who in Skulls. Ethnic Identification of Crania from Measurements. Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum.: Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. pp. vol. 82, pp. 108.
  7. 1 2 Ousley, Stephen, and Jantz, Richard. "Fordisc Help File, Version 1.35." Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute. http://math.mercyhurst.edu/~sousley/Fordisc/Help/Fordisc3_Help.pdf
  8. ↑ Elliott, Marina; Collard, Mark (2009-11-11). "Fordisc and the determination of ancestry from cranial measurements". Biology Letters. 2009 (5). The Royal Society: 849–852. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.0462. PMC   2827999 . PMID   19586965. The program's poor performance in the analyses in which the test specimen's source population was excluded from the reference sample suggests that it cannot be relied on to assign an unidentified specimen to a closely related population in the absence of its own group. Because Fordisc's reference datasets contain fewer than 30 populations, the chances that an unidentified specimen's group will be represented in them are low. Given this, and the fact that complete crania are uncommon in archaeological and forensic contexts, there is reason to believe that Fordisc will only rarely identify the ancestry of an unidentified specimen. In fact, Fordisc may be even less useful than our results suggest...
  9. ↑ "Poster: Elliott and Collard 2012 Going head to head: FORDISC vs CRANID in the determination of ancestry from craniometric data". meeting.physanth.org. Archived from the original on 2021-04-19. Retrieved 2015-10-22.
  10. ↑ https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/application-forensic-discriminant-functions-spanish-cranial-sample
  11. ↑ "UT Knoxville | Forensic Anthropology Center | Forensic Anthropology Data Bank Archived 2015-10-29 at the Wayback Machine ". fac.utk.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-15.

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