title: How can HMMs be used for handwriting recognition?
body: <p>The problem is a bit different than traditional handwriting recognition.  I have a dataset that are thousands of the following.  For one drawn character, I have several sequential <code>(x, y)</code> coordinates where the pen was pressed down.  So, this is a sequential (temporal) problem.</p>
  
  <p>I want to be able to classify handwritten characters based on this data, and would love to implement HMMs for learning purposes.  But, is this the right approach?  How can they be used to do this?</p>