Tuesday, 26 May: 12 pm

Speaker: Prof David Balding, Professor of Statistical Genetics at The University of Melbourne and Director of the newly-established Melbourne Integrative Genomics (MIG).

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Abstract: Courts have long struggled with weighing up evidence of a scientific nature, and these problems came to the fore when the introduction of DNA evidence was accompanied by major controversies. Contributions to the debate from scientists (including statisticians) made it clear that many of them were also very poor at understanding evidential weight, and that the paradigms of classical statistics were unsuited to the criminal justice setting and added to the confusion. Slowly, progress has been made using probabilistic modelling aligned with the Bayesian approach to statistical inference, and best practice in evaluating forensic evidence now has lessons for other areas of science, including a response to the so-called replication crisis in science.