RESUMO
Accurate estimation of human adult age has always been a problem for anthropologists, archaeologists and forensic scientists. The main factor contributing to the difficulties is the high variability of physiological age indicators. However, confounding this variability in many age estimation applications is a systematic tendency for age estimates, regardless of physiological indicator employed, to assign ages which are too high for young individuals, and too low for older individuals. This paper shows that at least part of this error is the inevitable consequence of the statistical procedures used to extract an estimate of age from age indicators, and that the magnitude of the error is inversely related to how well an age indicator is correlated with age. The use of classical calibration over inverse calibration is recommended for age estimation.
Assuntos
Determinação da Idade pelo Esqueleto , Envelhecimento/patologia , Modelos Estatísticos , Paleopatologia , Adolescente , Adulto , Idoso , Antropologia/métodos , Arqueologia/métodos , Calibragem , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Medicina Legal/métodos , Humanos , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Análise de RegressãoRESUMO
Much of the data which appears in the forensic and archaeological literature is ordinal or categorical. This is particularly true of the age related indicators presented by Gustafson in his method of human adult age estimation using the structural changes in human teeth. This technique is still being modified and elaborated. However, the statistical methods of regression analysis employed by Gustafson and others are not particularly appropriate to this type of data, but are still employed because alternatives have not yet been explored. This paper presents a novel approach based upon the application of Bayes' theorem to ordinal and categorical data, which overcomes many of the problems associated with regression analysis.
