Investigating Human Cremated Remains using Principal Component Analysis

Indianapolis, IN

This project builds upon existing work in which principal component analysis (PCA) was used to distinguish between human cremated remains and other materials based on their chemical fingerprints. A program will be created in MATLAB that imports text files, extracts numerical data, and generates a matrix that is ready to be analyzed with PCA. This process will virtually eliminate errors that can occur when performing such calculations manually. Furthermore, a quantifiable level of certainty with which an unknown sample can be labeled authentic human cremated remains will be investigated.