What is the `relevant population' in Bayesian forensic inference?

Abstract

In works discussing the Bayesian paradigm for presenting forensic evidence in court, the concept of a `relevant population' is often mentioned, without a clear definition of what is meant, and without recommendations of how to select such populations. This note is to try to better understand this concept. Our analysis is intended to be general enough to be applicable to different forensic technologies and we shall consider both DNA profiling and speaker recognition as examples.