Reply to the commentary of Burkhard Madea and Elke Doberentz on our article "An assessment of the Henssge method for forensic death time estimation in the early post-mortem interval".

A predictive model is developed to forecast an outcome of interest within a target population based on the characteristics of the cases. The model aims to identify key factors associated with the outcome of interest to achieve a high degree of agreement between observed and predicted outcome values (i.e. model precision). For models that seek to predict the time since death, the target population includes individuals who died at a crime scene, as predicting the time since death is especially relevant in these instances. The Henssge model, based on the work of Marshall and Hoare [2], was developed using a cohort of individuals who were not reported to have died at a crime scene and for whom a known time since death was established, comprising a convenience sample of 39 bodies from corpses admitted to an Institute of Legal Medicine in Germany (cases of sudden death in public an hospital cases [3, 4]). Furthermore, model development was conducted without external validation steps, making it prone to overfitting.