An investigation into the performance of methods for adjusting for sampling uncertainty in DNA likelihood ratio calculations

There is a variety of methods for assessing sampling uncertainty in likelihood ratio calculations in DNA casework. Sampling uncertainty arises because all DNA statistical methods rely on a database of collected profiles. Such databases can be regarded as a sample from the population of interest. The act of taking a sample incurs sampling uncertainty. In some circumstances it may be desirable to provide some estimate of this uncertainty. We have addressed this topic in two previous publications [1] and [2]. In this paper we reconsider the performance of the methods using 15 locus Identifiler™ profiles, rather than the 6 locus data used in [1]. We also examine the differences in performance observed when using a uniform prior versus a 1/k prior in the Bayesian highest posterior density (HPD) method of Curran et al. [1].