A BAYESIAN-APPROACH TO ADULT HUMAN AGE ESTIMATION FROM DENTAL OBSERVATIONS BY JOHANSONS AGE-CHANGES

Much of the data which appears in the forensic and archaeological lite rature is ordinal or categorical. This is particularly true of the age related indicators presented by Gustafson [1] in his method of human adult age estimation using the structural changes in human teeth. This technique is still being modified and elaborated. However, the statis tical methods of regression analysis employed by Gustafson and others are not particularly appropriate to this type of data, but are still e mployed because alternatives have not yet been explored. This paper pr esents a novel approach based upon the application of Bayes' theorem t o ordinal and categorical data, which overcomes many of the problems a ssociated with regression analysis.