The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report which calls for improvements to the field of forensic science. Their report criticized many forensic disciplines for failure to establish rigorously-tested methods of comparison, and encouraged more research in these areas to establish limitations and assess error rates. This study applies chemometric and statistical methods to current and developing analytical techniques in fiber analysis. In addition to analysis of commercially available dyed textile fibers, two pairs of dyes are selected based for custom fabric dyeing on the similarities of their absorbance spectra and dye molecular structures. Visible absorption spectra for all fiber samples are collected using microspectrophotometry (MSP) and mass spectra are collected using electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectrometry. Statistical calculations are performed using commercial software packages and software written in-house. Levels of Type I and Type II error are examined for fiber discrimination based on hypothesis testing of visible absorbance spectra using a nonparametric permutation method. This work also explores evaluation of known and questioned fiber populations based on an assessment of p-value distributions from questioned-known fiber comparisons with those of known fiber self-comparisons. Results from the hypothesis testing are compared with principal components analysis (PCA) and discriminant analysis (DA) of visible absorption spectra, as well as PCA and DA of ESI mass spectra. The sensitivity of a statistical approach will also be discussed in terms of how instrumental parameters and sampling methods may influence error rates.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2693 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Creators | White, Katie Margaret |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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