Forensic entomology when the evidence is "no insect." Best carrion fly species for predicting maximum postmortem interval in the United Arab Emirates.

The carrion insect species that most quickly deposit offspring on a corpse are, when available, likely to yield a more useful estimate of postmortem interval (PMI) compared to later arrivals. This is in part because the age of the oldest larva will be as close as possible to the PMI when doing a development analysis, and because the preappearance interval (PAI), the time the corpse was exposed before insect colonization, corresponds to the narrowest window of time since death for an insect-free corpse when doing a succession analysis. Given replicated training data a prediction of exposure time for a corpse can be in the form of a confidence set, and the maximum value of that set for an insect-free corpse is a probabilistic version of PAI.