Relevant population
Definition
The population of individuals who could plausibly have left the forensic sample, constrained by geography, time, and other case facts. Choosing the right relevant population is critical: using the entire national population when the suspect pool is much smaller deflates the weight of the evidence.
Related terms
- Defence fallacy
- The converse error of inflating the importance of the RMP by arguing that, because many people in the population share the profile,...
- Likelihood ratio (LR)
- The ratio of two conditional probabilities: the probability of the observed evidence given the prosecution's hypothesis (same source), divided by the probability...
- Prior probability
- The probability of guilt (or innocence) based on all evidence other than the specific forensic match under consideration. Bayes' theorem requires a...
- Prosecutor's fallacy
- The error of treating the RMP (or its reciprocal) as the probability that the defendant is innocent, or as the probability that...
- Random match probability (RMP)
- The probability that a randomly chosen unrelated person from the relevant population would match the evidence profile by chance. A very small...
Explained in
- The Defence FallacyThe population of individuals who could plausibly have left the forensic sample, constrained by geography, time, and other case facts. Choosing the right relev...