Statistical Analysis of Circular Data

Rating:
Summary: a good reference for this niche of statistics
Review: I came across this book while looking for methods to smooth local orientation measures in an image processing application. The author presents more information than you wanted to know about the "right" ways to compute averages and related measures of axial (undirected) data. Particularly useful is the treatment of tests of uniformity and the discussion of the Von Mises and wrapped normal distributions. If you work with data that is best described around the circle, e.g. direction of bird flight from a landmark, this is a good reference to have on hand. It will help you to avoid the common mistake of applying conventional descriptive statistics to circular data.