  The forensic attribution of the handwriting in a digitized document to
multiple scribes is a challenging problem of high dimensionality. Unique
handwriting styles may be dissimilar in a blend of several factors including
character size, stroke width, loops, ductus, slant angles, and cursive
ligatures. Previous work on labeled data with Hidden Markov models, support
vector machines, and semi-supervised recurrent neural networks have provided
moderate to high success. In this study, we successfully detect hand shifts in
a historical manuscript through fuzzy soft clustering in combination with
linear principal component analysis. This advance demonstrates the successful
deployment of unsupervised methods for writer attribution of historical
documents and forensic document analysis.
