We study properties of Fisher distribution (von Mises-Fisher distribution, matrix Langevin distribution) on the rotation group SO(3). In particular we apply the holonomic gradient descent, introduced by Nakayama et al. (2011), and a method of series expansion for evaluating the normalizing constant of the distribution and for computing the maximum likelihood estimate. The rotation group can be identified with the Stiefel manifold of two orthonormal vectors. Therefore from the viewpoint of statistical modeling, it is of interest to compare Fisher distributions on these manifolds. We illustrate the difference with an example of near-earth objects data.
In this paper we implement the holonomic gradient method to exactly compute the normalising constant of Bingham distributions. This idea is originally applied for general Fisher-Bingham distributions in Nakayama et al. (2011). In this paper we explicitly apply this algorithm to show the exact calculation of the normalising constant; derive explicitly the Pfaffian system for this parametric case; implement the general approach for the maximum likelihood solution search and finally adjust the method for degenerate cases, namely when the parameter values have multiplicities.
Holonomic function theory has been successfully implemented in a series of recent papers to efficiently calculate the normalizing constant and perform likelihood estimation for the Fisher-Bingham distributions. A key ingredient for establishing the standard holonomic gradient algorithms is the calculation of the Pfaffian equations. So far, these papers either calculate these symbolically or apply certain methods to simplify this process. Here we show the explicit form of the Pfaffian equations using the expressions from Laplace inversion methods. This improves on the implementation of the holonomic algorithms for these problems and enables their adjustments for the degenerate cases. As a result, an exact and more dimensionally efficient ODE is implemented for likelihood inference.
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