Graphology analysis for detecting hexaco personality and character through handwriting images by using convolutional neural networks and particle swarm optimization methods

Graphology or handwriting analysis can be used to infer the traits of the writers by examining each stroke, space, pressure, and pattern of the handwriting. In this study, we infer a six-dimensional model of human personality (HEXACO) using a Convolutional Neural Network supported by Particle Swarm Optimization. These personalities include Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness (versus Anger), Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. A digital handwriting sample data of 293 different individuals associated with 36 types of personalities were collected and derived from the HEXACO space. A convolutional neural network model called GraphoNet is built and optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The PSO is used to optimize epoch, minibatch, and droupout parameters on the GraphoNet. Although predicting 32 personalities is quite challenging, the GraphoNet predicts personalities with 71.88% accuracy using epoch 100, minibatch 30 and dropout 52% while standard AlexNet only achieves 25%. Moreover, GraphoNet can work with lower resolution (32 x 32 pixels) compared to standard AlexNet (227 x 227 pixels)

Automatic Personality Prediction; an Enhanced Method Using Ensemble Modeling

Human personality is significantly represented by those words which he/she uses in his/her speech or writing. As a consequence of spreading the information infrastructures (specifically the Internet and social media), human communications have reformed notably from face to face communication. Generally, Automatic Personality Prediction (or Perception) (APP) is the automated forecasting of the personality on different types of human generated/exchanged contents (like text, speech, image, video, etc.). The major objective of this study is to enhance the accuracy of APP from the text. To this end, we suggest five new APP methods including term frequency vector-based, ontology-based, enriched ontology-based, latent semantic analysis (LSA)-based, and deep learning-based (BiLSTM) methods. These methods as the base ones, contribute to each other to enhance the APP accuracy through ensemble modeling (stacking) based on a hierarchical attention network (HAN) as the meta-model. The results show that ensemble modeling enhances the accuracy of APP

Gender identification through handwriting: An online approach

The present study was designed to identify writer's gender trough online handwriting and drawing analysis. Two groups - one of 126 males (mean age 24.65, SD=2.45) and the other of 114 females (mean age 24.51, SD=2.50) participants were recruited in the experiment. They were asked to perform seven writing and drawing tasks utilizing a digitizing tablet and a special writing device. Seventeen writing features grouped into five categories have been considered. The experiment's results show that the set of considered features enable to discriminate between male and female writers investigating their performance while copying a house drawing (task 2), writing words in capital letters (task 3) and writing a complete sentence in cursive letters (task 7), in particular focusing on Ductus (number of strokes) and Time categories of writing features

Machine Learning Approach to Improve Data Connectivity in Text-based Personality Prediction using Multiple Data Sources Mapping

This paper considers the task of personality prediction using social media text data. Personality datasets with conventional personality labels are few, and collecting them is challenging due to privacy concerns and the high expense of hiring expert psychologists to label them. Pertaining to a smaller number of labelled samples available, existing studies usually adds a sentiment, statistical NLP features to the text data to improve the accuracy of the personality detection model. To overcome these concerns, this research proposes a new methodology to generate a large amount of labelled data that can be used by deep learning algorithms. The model has three components: general data representation, data mapping and classification. The model applies Personality correlation descriptors to incorporate correlation information and further use this information in generating dataset mapping algorithm. Experimental results clearly demonstrate that the proposed method beats strong baselines across a variety of evaluation metrics. The results had the highest accuracy of 86.24% and 0.915 F1 measure score on the combined MBTI and Essays dataset. Moreover, the new dataset constructed contains 3,84,089 labelled samples on the combined dataset and can be further considered for personality prediction using the famous Five Factor Model thereby alleviating the problem of limited labelled samples for the purpose of personality detection

Handwriting Analysis and Personality: A Computerized Study on the Validity of Graphology

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

Adversarial Activity Detection and Prediction Using Behavioral Biometrics

Behavioral biometrics can be used in different security applications like authentication, identification, etc. One of the trending applications is predicting future activities of people and guessing whether they will engage in malicious activities in the future. In this research, we study the possibility of predicting future activities and propose novel methods for near-future activity prediction. First, we study gait signals captured using smartphone accelerometer sensor and build a model to predict a future gait signal. Activity recognition using body movements captured from mobile phone sensors has been a major point of interest in recent research. Data that is being continuously read from mobile sensors can be used to recognize user activity. We propose a model for predicting human body movements based on the previous activity that has been read from sensors and continuously updating our prediction as new data becomes available. Our results show that our model can predict the future movement signal with a high accuracy that can contribute to several applications in the area. Second, we study keystroke acoustics and build a model for predicting future activities of the users by recording their keystrokes audio. Using keystroke acoustics to predict typed text has significant advantages, such as being recorded covertly from a distance and requiring no physical access to the computer system. Recently, some studies have been done on keystroke acoustics, however, to the best of our knowledge none have used them to predict adversarial activities. On a dataset of two million keystrokes consisting of seven adversarial and one benign activity, we use a signal processing approach to extract keystrokes from the audio and a clustering method to recover the typed letters followed by a text recovery module to regenerate the typed words. Furthermore, we use a neural network model to classify the benign and adversarial activities and achieve significant results: (1) we extract individual keystroke sounds from the raw audio with 91% accuracy and recover words from audio recordings in a noisy environment with 71% average top-10 accuracy. (2) We classify adversarial activities with 93% to 98% average accuracy under different operating scenarios. Third, we study the correlation between the personality traits of users with their keystroke and mouse dynamics. Even with the availability of multiple interfaces, such as voice, touch, etc., keyboard and mouse remain the primary interfaces to a computer. Any insights on the relation between keyboard and mouse dynamics with the personality type of the users can provide foundations for various applications, such as advertisement, social media, etc. We use a dataset of keystroke and mouse dynamics collected from 104 users together with their responses to two personality tests to analyze how their interaction with the computer relates to their personality. Our findings show that there are considerable trends and patterns in keystroke and mouse dynamics that are correlated with each personality type

Exploring the scholar-practitioner gap in personnel selection assessments : an analysis of scholarly versus practitioner literature.

Research suggests that a gap exists between scholarly findings and practitioner knowledge, beliefs, and practices in the Human Resource field, particularly in the area of employee selection (Deadrick & Gibson, 2007; Rynes, Giluk, & Brown, 2007). This study seeks to explore this gap relative to self-report selection assessments by examining practitioner-oriented versus scholarly literature. Articles published between January 2006 and September 2011 from two scholarly sources (Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology) and two practitioner sources (HR Magazine and HR Executive) were reviewed, and 49 articles were selected for inclusion in analysis. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the articles relative to five themes: purpose of the article, type of selection assessment discussed, specific instruments mentioned, how validity was discussed, and how utility was discussed. It was found that there were significant differences in the way that scholarly and practitioner publications discussed assessments, especially in the areas of validity and utility. Implications for scholars and practitioners are discussed

Linguistic Threat Assessment: Understanding Targeted Violence through Computational Linguistics

Language alluding to possible violence is widespread online, and security professionals are increasingly faced with the issue of understanding and mitigating this phenomenon. The volume of extremist and violent online data presents a workload that is unmanageable for traditional, manual threat assessment. Computational linguistics may be of particular relevance to understanding threats of grievance-fuelled targeted violence on a large scale. This thesis seeks to advance knowledge on the possibilities and pitfalls of threat assessment through automated linguistic analysis. Based on in-depth interviews with expert threat assessment practitioners, three areas of language are identified which can be leveraged for automation of threat assessment, namely, linguistic content, style, and trajectories. Implementations of each area are demonstrated in three subsequent quantitative chapters. First, linguistic content is utilised to develop the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary aimed at measuring concepts related to grievance-fuelled violence in text. Thereafter, linguistic content is supplemented with measures of linguistic style in order to examine the feasibility of author profiling (determining gender, age, and personality) in abusive texts. Lastly, linguistic trajectories are measured over time in order to assess the effect of an external event on an extremist movement. Collectively, the chapters in this thesis demonstrate that linguistic automation of threat assessment is indeed possible. The concluding chapter describes the limitations of the proposed approaches and illustrates where future potential lies to improve automated linguistic threat assessment. Ideally, developers of computational implementations for threat assessment strive for explainability and transparency. Furthermore, it is argued that computational linguistics holds particular promise for large-scale measurement of grievance-fuelled language, but is perhaps less suited to prediction of actual violent behaviour. Lastly, researchers and practitioners involved in threat assessment are urged to collaboratively and critically evaluate novel computational tools which may emerge in the future