Probabilistic abductive computation of evidence collection strategies in crime investigation

This paper presents a methodology for integrating two approaches to building decision support systems (DSS) for crime investigation: symbolic crime scenario abduction [16] and Bayesian forensic evidence evaluation [5]. This is achieved by means of a novel compositional modelling technique that allows for automatically generating a space of models describing plausible crime scenarios from given evidence and formally represented domain knowledge. The main benefit of this integration is that the resulting DSS is capable to formulate effective evidence collection strategies useful for differentiating competing crime scenarios. A running example is used to demonstrate the theoretical developments.