On the use of aggregation operators to improve human identification using dental records

The comparison of dental records is a standardized technique in forensic odontology used to speed up the identification of individuals in multiple-comparison scenarios. Specifically, the odontogram comparison is a procedure to compute criteria that will be used to perform a ranking. State-of-the-art automatic methods either make use of simple techniques, without utilizing the full potential of the information obtained from a comparison, or their internal behavior is not known due to the lack of detailed description or peer-reviewed publications. This work aims to design aggregation mechanisms to automatically compare pairs of dental records that can be understood and validated by experts, improving the current methods. To do so, we introduce different aggregation approaches using the state-of-the-art codification, based on seven different criteria. In particular, we study the performance of: (i) data-driven lexicographical order-based aggregations, (ii) well-known fuzzy logic aggregation methods, and (iii) machine learning techniques as aggregation mechanisms. To validate our proposals, 215 real-world forensic cases from two different populations have been used. The results obtained show how the use of white-box machine learning techniques as aggregation models (average ranking from 2.02 to 2.21) are able to improve the state of the art (average ranking of 3.91) without compromising the explainability and interpretability of the method.