Regularized multivariate von Mises distribution

Regularization is necessary to avoid overfitting when the number of data samples is low compared to the number of parameters of the model. In this paper, we introduce a flexible L1 regularization for the multivariate von Mises distribution. We also propose a circular distance that can be used to estimate the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two circular distributions by means of sampling, and also serves as goodness-of-fit measure. We compare the models on synthetic data and real morphological data from human neurons and show that the regularized model achieves better results than non regularized von Mises model

Frobenius norm regularization for the multivariate von Misses distribution

Penalizing the model complexity is necessary to avoid overfittingwhen the number of data samples is low with respect to the number of model parameters. In this paper, we introduce a penalization term that places an independent prior distribution for each parameter of the multivariate von Mises distribution.We also propose a circular distance that can be used to estimate the Kullback–Leibler divergence between any two circular distributions as goodness-of-fit measure. We compare the resulting regularized von Mises models on synthetic data and real neuroanatomical data to show that the distribution fitted using the penalized estimator generally achieves better results than nonpenalized multivariate von Mises estimator

Recent advances in directional statistics

Mainstream statistical methodology is generally applicable to data observed in Euclidean space. There are, however, numerous contexts of considerable scientific interest in which the natural supports for the data under consideration are Riemannian manifolds like the unit circle, torus, sphere and their extensions. Typically, such data can be represented using one or more directions, and directional statistics is the branch of statistics that deals with their analysis. In this paper we provide a review of the many recent developments in the field since the publication of Mardia and Jupp (1999), still the most comprehensive text on directional statistics. Many of those developments have been stimulated by interesting applications in fields as diverse as astronomy, medicine, genetics, neurology, aeronautics, acoustics, image analysis, text mining, environmetrics, and machine learning. We begin by considering developments for the exploratory analysis of directional data before progressing to distributional models, general approaches to inference, hypothesis testing, regression, nonparametric curve estimation, methods for dimension reduction, classification and clustering, and the modelling of time series, spatial and spatio-temporal data. An overview of currently available software for analysing directional data is also provided, and potential future developments discussed.Comment: 61 page

Local polynomial regression for circular predictors

We consider local smoothing of datasets where the design space is the d-dimensional (d >= 1) torus and the response variable is real-valued. Our purpose is to extend least squares local polynomial fitting to this situation. We give both theoretical and empirical results