A first approach to a fuzzy classification system for age estimation based on the pubic bone

Abstract

The study of human remains suffers from a lack of information for determining a reliable estimation of the age of an individual. One of the most extended methods for this task was proposed in the twenties of the past century and is based on the analysis of the pubic bone. The method describes some age changes occurring in the pubic bone and establishes ten different age ranges with a description of the morphological aspect of the bone in each one of them. These descriptions are sometimes vague and there is not a systematic way for using the method. In this contribution we propose two different preliminary fuzzy rule-based classification system designs for age estimation from the pubic bone that consider the main morphological characteristics of the bone as independent and linguistic variables. So, we have identified the problem variables and we have defined the corresponding linguistic labels making use of forensic expert knowledge, that is also considered to design a decision support fuzzy system. A brief collection of pubic bones labeled by forensic anthropologists has been used for learning the second fuzzy rule-based classification system by means of a fuzzy decision tree. The experiments developed report a best performance of the latter approach.