Statistics in forensic genetics

Forensic genetics and DNA-investigations are an increasingly important part of e.g. immigration-, paternity- and criminal cases. There is an international consensus about investigation of Short Tandem Repeat (STR) regions with polymerase chain reaction based methods, standardized by international collaboration. The question of quantification and presentation of the weight of the DNA evidence for the court contains many statistical and philosophical statistical problems, as does the investigation of the behaviour of the standardized kit’s used in the DNA- analysis. Research in forensic statistics has to acknowledge the special world of decision-making in the courtroom, and it takes methods and principles from probability theory, classical likelihood theory and Bayesian networks.