CircStat: A MATLAB Toolbox for Circular Statistics

Abstract

Directional data is ubiquitious in science. Due to its\ncircular nature such data cannot be analyzed with commonly used statistical\ntechniques. Despite the rapid development of specialized methods for\ndirectional statistics over the last fifty years, there is only little software available that makes such methods easy to use for\npractioners. Most importantly, one of the most commonly used programming\nlanguages in engineering and biosciences, Matlab, is currently not supporting directional\nstatistics. To remedy this situation, we have implemented the CircStat toolbox\nfor Matlab which provides methods for the descriptive and inferential statistical analysis\nof directional data. We cover the statistical background of the available methods and describe how to apply them to data. Finally, we analyze a dataset from neurophysiology to demonstrate the capabilities of the CircStat toolbox.