Abstract

Handwriting analysis, also known as graphology, is defined as an analysis of a psychological structure of a human subject through his/her handwriting. It has been applied recently in different fields including areas where making a crucial decision is highly desirable such as forensic evidence, criminology, and disease analysis. However, making a crucial decision based on the results of handwriting analysis is a controversial scientific topic because
the validity of graphology rules is still in question.

A few validity studies on handwriting analysis have already been conducted earlier using the evaluation of correlation between psychological questionnaires and manual handwriting analysis and they ended up with conflicting results. Manual handwriting analysis suffers from some issues which could be the reasons of the early inconsistent results. Therefore, this study conducted an empirical study that investigates the validation of graphology rules
by evaluating the correlation between one of psychological tests named Big Five Factor Markers Test and our proposed automated handwriting analysis system that measures the level of the same big five personality traits based on graphological rules.

Our automated BFFM system is called Averaging of SMOTE multi-label SVM-CNN (AvgMlSC). It constructs synthetic samples using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and averages two learning-based classifiers i.e. Multi-label Support Vector Machine and Multi-label Convolutional Neural Network based on offline handwriting recognition to produce one optimal predictive model. The model is trained using 1066 handwriting samples written in English, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. The results reveal that our proposed model outperformed the overall performance of five traditional models with 93% predictive accuracy, 0.94 AUC, and 90% F-Score.

The statistical test of Spearman’s correlation reports that there is a statistically significant relationship between the score of the big five factors questionnaire and the graphologist’s evaluation for the Big Five Factors with a different strength of relationship. A weak positive
relationship is found for Extraversion. However, a moderate positive relationship is reported for Conscientiousness and Open to Experience. On the other hand, a strong positive relationship is indicated for Agreeableness, whilst a very weak positive relationship
has been found for the last factor which is Emotional Stability.