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Abstract:
Directional data is ubiquitious in science. Due to its
circular nature such data cannot be analyzed with commonly used statistical
techniques. Despite the rapid development of specialized methods for
directional statistics over the last fifty years, there is only little software available that makes such methods easy to use for
practioners. Most importantly, one of the most commonly used programming
languages in engineering and biosciences, Matlab, is currently not supporting directional
statistics. To remedy this situation, we have implemented the CircStat toolbox
for Matlab which provides methods for the descriptive and inferential statistical analysis
of 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.
