On the use of Aggregation Operators to improve Human Identification using Dental Records

TL;DR

This paper introduces aggregation mechanisms, including machine learning models, to enhance the comparison of dental records in forensic identification, achieving improved accuracy while maintaining interpretability.

Contribution

It proposes new aggregation approaches using expert-understandable methods and machine learning to improve dental record comparison in forensic identification.

Findings

Machine learning aggregation models improve ranking performance.

White-box models maintain interpretability.

Results outperform existing methods in accuracy.

Abstract

The comparison of dental records is a standardized technique in forensic dentistry used to speed up the identification of individuals in multiple-comparison scenarios. Specifically, the odontogram comparison is a procedure to compute criteria that will be used to perform a ranking. State-of-the-art automatic methods either make use of simple techniques, without utilizing the full potential of the information obtained from a comparison, or their internal behavior is not known due to the lack of peer-reviewed publications. This work aims to design aggregation mechanisms to automatically compare pairs of dental records that can be understood and validated by experts, improving the current methods. To do so, we introduce different aggregation approaches using the state-of-the-art codification, based on seven different criteria. In particular, we study the performance of i) data-driven lexicographical order-based aggregations, ii) well-known fuzzy logic aggregation methods and iii) machine learning techniques as aggregation mechanisms. To validate our proposals, 215 forensic cases from two different populations have been used. The results obtained show how the use of white-box machine learning techniques as aggregation models (average ranking from 2.02 to 2.21) are able to improve the state-of-the-art (average ranking of 3.91) without compromising the explainability and interpretability of the method.