A new measure of preferred direction for circular data using angular wrapping

Abstract

The statistical techniques which are developed for the analysis of data in the linear number system cannot be applied to directional data directly. Circular data may be discontinuous in some principal interval. These discontinuities cause failure results in the circular statistics. Because of that the proposed wrapping operator must be used for data, which are defined in the discontinuous range. However, in both continuity and discontinuity, the wrapping operator works correctly. The most common preferred directions for circular data are circular mean and variance summarizing and comparing them. Although circular data has a very important role in statistics, the literature is weak in terms of statistical analysis of circular data. It creates a gap in this field. This study examines the preferred direction of circular data to fill this gap and presents a new measure of preferred direction for circular data using angular wrapping. Four different artificial and three real datasets are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods in terms of the absolute error and absolute percentage error. Consequently, it has been seen that the proposed methods giv e more consistent and more accurate results than thevectorial methods.