Research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice (Award nr. NIJ 2008-DN-BX-K146). Ficheiro de 1,54 MB em formato PDF (109 p.). Resumo inserto na publicação.

This project applied target compound analysis from high resolution Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GCMS) utilized for gasoline individualization to Medium Petroleum Distillates (MPD) and kerosene which may be used as accelerants in arson cases. A major goal of this project was to establish analytical tools that provide a statistical evaluation for forensic comparison between ignitable liquid residues in fire debris and ignitable liquids in the possession of a suspect. Classifications based on two-way profile and target component ratios were compared. For kerosene, the Projected Difference Resolution (PDR) mapping technique was applied to measure the quantitative differences among the Ignitable Liquid (IL) samples by their GCMS profiles. Fuzzy Rule-building Expert Systems (FuRESs) were applied to classify individual ILs. The FuRES models yielded correct classification rates greater than 90% for discriminating between samples. PDR mapping, a new method for characterizing complex data sets was consistent with the FuRES classification result. For MPD, the Kendall’s-tau metric for ‘association/no-association’ was utilized to demonstrate ‘association/no-association’ true positive rates in excess of 95% with false positive rates ~5%.