Modern Directional Statistics collects important advances in methodology and theory for directional statistics over the last two decades. It provides a detailed overview and analysis of recent results that can help both researchers and practitioners. Knowledge of multivariate statistics eases the reading but is not mandatory. The field of directional statistics has received a lot of attention over the past two decades, due to new demands from domains such as life sciences or machine learning, to the availability of massive data sets requiring adapted statistical techniques, and to technological advances. This book covers important progresses in distribution theory,high-dimensional statistics, kernel density estimation, efficient inference on directional supports, and computational and graphical methods. Christophe Ley is professor of mathematical statistics at Ghent University. His research interests include semi-parametrically efficient inference, flexible modeling, directional statistics and the study of asymptotic approximations via Stein’s Method. His achievements include the Marie-Jeanne Laurent-Duhamel prize of the Société Française de Statistique and an elected membership at the International Statistical Institute. He is associate editor for the journals Computational Statistics & Data Analysis and Econometrics and Statistics. Thomas Verdebout is professor of mathematical statistics at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). His main research interests are semi-parametric statistics, high- dimensional statistics, directional statistics and rank-based procedures. He has won an annual prize of the Belgian Academy of Sciences and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is associate editor for the journals Statistics and Probability Letters and Journal of Multivariate Analysis.

Modern Directional Statistics collects important advances in methodology and theory for directional statistics over the last two decades. It provides a detailed overview and analysis of recent results that can help both researchers and practitioners. Knowledge of multivariate statistics eases the reading but is not mandatory. The field of directional statistics has received a lot of attention over the past two decades, due to new demands from domains such as life sciences or machine learning, to the availability of massive data sets requiring adapted statistical techniques, and to technological advances. This book covers important progresses in distribution theory,high-dimensional statistics, kernel density estimation, efficient inference on directional supports, and computational and graphical methods. Christophe Ley is professor of mathematical statistics at Ghent University. His research interests include semi-parametrically efficient inference, flexible modeling, directional statistics and the study of asymptotic approximations via Stein’s Method. His achievements include the Marie-Jeanne Laurent-Duhamel prize of the Société Française de Statistique and an elected membership at the International Statistical Institute. He is associate editor for the journals Computational Statistics & Data Analysis and Econometrics and Statistics. Thomas Verdebout is professor of mathematical statistics at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). His main research interests are semi-parametric statistics, high- dimensional statistics, directional statistics and rank-based procedures. He has won an annual prize of the Belgian Academy of Sciences and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is associate editor for the journals Statistics and Probability Letters and Journal of Multivariate Analysis.

This book collects important advances in methodology and data analysis for directional statistics. It is the companion book of the more theoretical treatment presented in Modern Directional Statistics (CRC Press, 2017). The field of directional statistics has received a lot of attention due to demands from disciplines such as life sciences or machine learning, the availability of massive data sets requiring adapted statistical techniques, and technological advances. This book covers important progress in bioinformatics, biology, astrophysics, oceanography, environmental sciences, earth sciences, machine learning and social sciences.

Observations which are directions, axes or rotations occur in many sciences, including astronomy, biology, earth sciences, image analysis, and medicine. To analyse such data it is necessary to use the techniques of directional statistics, in which the special structure of circles, spheres and rotation groups is taken into account. This book gives a unified and comprehensive account of directional statistics, presenting both the underlying statistical theory and the practical methodology. The book is divided into three parts. The first part concentrates on statistics on the circle. Topics covered include tests of uniformity, tests of goodness-of-fit, inference on von Mises distributions and non-parametric methods. The second part considers statistics on spheres of arbitrary dimension, and includes a detailed account of inference on the main distributions on spheres. Recent material on correlation, regression, time series, robust techniques, bootstrap methods, density estimation and curve fitting is presented. The third part considers statistics on more general sample spaces, in particular rotation groups, Stiefel manifolds, Grassmann manifolds and complex projective spaces. Shape analysis is considered from the perspective of directional statistics. This text will be invaluable not only to researchers in probability and statistics interested in the latest developments in directional statistics, but also to practitioners and researchers in many scientific fields, including astronomy, biology, computer vision, earth sciences and image analysis.

A unified, up-to-date account of circular data-handling techniques, useful throughout science.

Covers the latest developments in direction dependence research Direction Dependence in Statistical Modeling: Methods of Analysis incorporates the latest research for the statistical analysis of hypotheses that are compatible with the causal direction of dependence of variable relations. Having particular application in the fields of neuroscience, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and epidemiology, direction dependence methods have attracted growing attention due to their potential to help decide which of two competing statistical models is more likely to reflect the correct causal flow. The book covers several topics in-depth, including: A demonstration of the importance of methods for the analysis of direction dependence hypotheses A presentation of the development of methods for direction dependence analysis together with recent novel, unpublished software implementations A review of methods of direction dependence following the copula-based tradition of Sungur and Kim A presentation of extensions of direction dependence methods to the domain of categorical data An overview of algorithms for causal structure learning The book's fourteen chapters include a discussion of the use of custom dialogs and macros in SPSS to make direction dependence analysis accessible to empirical researchers.