Role of Chemometrics in Forensic Identification of Body Fluids

Chemometrics is the use of statistical methods in the analytical sciences, and it is used for uncovering the hidden pattern in the data especially generated from analytical instruments such as infrared spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and Raman spectroscopy. These techniques segmented with chemometric tools have enhanced our capabilities of identification, differentiation, and characterization of body fluids and the foreign substances present in the body fluids. Chemometric tools can be categorized into supervised and unsupervised chemometric tools. Unsupervised chemometric tools are used for exploratory analysis, whereas supervised tools are used for predictive modeling. Before using chemometric tools the data must be screened using data processing tools such as baseline correction, normalization, single normal variate (SNV), and smoothing. Once this is done data is subjected to principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), hierarchical analysis, etc. These tools, if used properly, can help in understanding the hidden patterns in the data.