An introduction to statistical methods for circular data

Abstract

Angles, directions, events, occurrences along time... all of them can be viewed as data on a circle (circular data). The particular nature of this type of data requires specific and adapted inferential and modelling procedures. Although there are quite a few references on this topic, and despite circular data are quite common in many applied sciences, they are frequently overlooked. This brief introduction aims to give the reader just some basic ideas on circular data analysis (with some mentions to the general case of spherical or directional data), providing some relevant references and tools for their application in practice