A cylindrical distribution with heavy-tailed linear part

Abstract

A cylindrical distribution whose linear part models heavy-tailedness is proposed. The conditional distribution of the linear variable given the circular variable is a generalized Pareto-type distribution. Therefore, it may not have any conditional moments; however, the mode and median have closed-form expressions. The circular marginal distribution is a wrapped Cauchy distribution, and the conditional distribution of the circular variable given the linear variable belongs to a family of symmetric distributions. These properties allow its application to cylindrical data, whose linear observations may take large values and whose circular observations are symmetric. As illustrative examples, the proposed distribution is fitted to two data sets, and the results are compared with those by other cylindrical distributions that cannot model heavy-tailedness for the linear parts.