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Main Authors: Iste, Adrian, Nishizawa, Kazuki, Tanaka, Chisa, Vargo, Andrew, Scius-Bertrand, Anna, Fischer, Andreas, Kise, Koichi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11519
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author Iste, Adrian
Nishizawa, Kazuki
Tanaka, Chisa
Vargo, Andrew
Scius-Bertrand, Anna
Fischer, Andreas
Kise, Koichi
author_facet Iste, Adrian
Nishizawa, Kazuki
Tanaka, Chisa
Vargo, Andrew
Scius-Bertrand, Anna
Fischer, Andreas
Kise, Koichi
contents Digital handwriting acquisition enables the capture of detailed temporal and kinematic signals reflecting the motor processes underlying writing behavior. While handwriting analysis has been extensively explored in clinical or adult populations, its potential for studying developmental and educational characteristics in children remains less investigated. In this work, we examine whether handwriting dynamics encode information related to student characteristics using a large-scale online dataset collected from Japanese students from elementary school to junior high school. We systematically compare three families of handwriting-derived features: basic statistical descriptors of kinematic signals, entropy-based measures of variability, and parameters obtained from the sigma-lognormal model. Although the dataset contains dense stroke-level recordings, features are aggregated at the student level to enable a controlled comparison between representations. These features are evaluated across three prediction tasks: grade prediction, gender classification, and academic performance classification, using Linear or Logistic Regression and Random Forest models under consistent experimental settings. The results show that handwriting dynamics contain measurable signals related to developmental stage and individual differences, especially for the grade prediction task. These findings highlight the potential of kinematic handwriting analysis and confirm that through their development, children's handwriting evolves toward a lognormal motor organization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11519
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prediction of Grade, Gender, and Academic Performance of Children and Teenagers from Handwriting Using the Sigma-Lognormal Model
Iste, Adrian
Nishizawa, Kazuki
Tanaka, Chisa
Vargo, Andrew
Scius-Bertrand, Anna
Fischer, Andreas
Kise, Koichi
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Digital handwriting acquisition enables the capture of detailed temporal and kinematic signals reflecting the motor processes underlying writing behavior. While handwriting analysis has been extensively explored in clinical or adult populations, its potential for studying developmental and educational characteristics in children remains less investigated. In this work, we examine whether handwriting dynamics encode information related to student characteristics using a large-scale online dataset collected from Japanese students from elementary school to junior high school. We systematically compare three families of handwriting-derived features: basic statistical descriptors of kinematic signals, entropy-based measures of variability, and parameters obtained from the sigma-lognormal model. Although the dataset contains dense stroke-level recordings, features are aggregated at the student level to enable a controlled comparison between representations. These features are evaluated across three prediction tasks: grade prediction, gender classification, and academic performance classification, using Linear or Logistic Regression and Random Forest models under consistent experimental settings. The results show that handwriting dynamics contain measurable signals related to developmental stage and individual differences, especially for the grade prediction task. These findings highlight the potential of kinematic handwriting analysis and confirm that through their development, children's handwriting evolves toward a lognormal motor organization.
title Prediction of Grade, Gender, and Academic Performance of Children and Teenagers from Handwriting Using the Sigma-Lognormal Model
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11519