Prognosis of sexual dimorphism with unfused hyoid bone: Artificial intelligence informed decision making with discriminant analysis

Depending on the metric and non-metric skeletal features of various bones, forensic experts proposed diverse sex identification methods. The main focus of the present study is to calculate sexual dimorphism in human unfused or disarticulated hyoid bone and compared it with studies conducted by different researchers. For this study, 293 unfused hyoid bones were accumulated and investigated from 173 male and 120 female cadavers of the northwest Indian population from the age of 15 to 80 years. Initially, discriminant analysis was performed on the dataset to predict sex and to get an idea for the crucial variables for sexual dimorphism. Later, significant variables predicted by the discriminant analysis were used for machine learning approaches to improve accuracy for sex determination. The standard scaler method is used for pre-processing of the data before machine learning analysis and to prevent overfitting and underfitting, 70 % of the whole dataset was utilized in the training of the model and the remaining data were used for testing the model. According to the discriminant analysis, body length (BL) and body height (BH) were found to be highly significant for the sex determination and predicted sex with 75.1 % accuracy. However, implementation of machine learning approaches such as the XG Boost classifier increased the accuracy to 83 % with sensitivity, and specificity scores of 0.81 and 0.84, respectively. Moreover, the ROC-AUC score achieved by the XG Boost classifier is 0.89; indicating machine learning investigation can improve the sex determination accuracy up to the appropriate standard.