Sex Determination of Skull Based on Fuzzy Decision Tree

Abstract

The skeleton plays an important role in sex determination in forensic anthropology. The skull bone is considered as the second best after the pelvic bone in sex determination due to its better retention of morphological features. Different populations have varying skeletal characteristics, making population specific analysis for sex determination essential. However, most previous studies have used the traditional discriminant function method, which is highly dependent on the population, and does not consider the uncertainty in the process of sex identification. In view of the above problems, this paper proposes a method of sex identification based on fuzzy decision tree. The proposed method is to improve the uncertainty, by constructing the fuzzy function of statistical information based on the cranial measurement item, as the basis of the fuzzy decision process, the classification factor is determined at the end of the training process, and a fuzzy decision binary tree is established. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and can provide reference for the practical application of gender discrimination.

A Geometric Morphometric Study on Sexual Dimorphism in Viscerocranium

“…Logistic regression analysis has also been commonly applied in sex estimation studies [22][23][24]37,38]. Currently, data mining and machine learning approaches including support vector machines [28,30,[39][40][41], artificial neural networks [27,29,41], decision trees [42,43], and classification rule algorithms [43] are extensively applied.…”