B0838
Title: Functional data in forensic entomology: Estimation of temperature dependent growth processes
Authors: Davide Pigoli - King's College London (United Kingdom) [presenting]
Abstract: Larvae (or maggots) collected at crime scenes contribute important pieces of information to police investigations. In particular, their hatching time provides a lower bound for the post mortem interval, i.e. the interval between death and the discovery of the body. A functional data analysis approach is described here to model the local growth rate from the experimental data on larval development, where larvae have been exposed to a relatively small number of constant temperature profiles. This allows us to reconstruct varying temperature growth profiles and use them to find out the most likely hatching time for a sample of larvae from the crime scene.
