Transformation of circular random variables based on circular distribution functions

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new transformation of circular random variables based on circular distribution functions, which we shall call inverse distribution function (id f) transformation. We show that Möbius transformation is a special case of our id f transformation. Very general results are provided for the properties of the proposed family of id f transformations, including their trigonometric moments, maximum entropy, random variate generation, finite mixture and modality properties. In particular, we shall focus our attention on a subfamily of the general family when id f transformation is based on the cardioid circular distribution function. Modality and shape properties are investigated for this subfamily. In addition, we obtain further statistical properties for the resulting distribution by applying the id f transformation to a random variable following a von Mises distribution. In fact, we shall introduce the Cardioid-von Mises (CvM) distribution and estimate its parameters by the maximum likelihood method. Finally, an application of CvM family and its inferential methods are illustrated using a real data set containing times of gun crimes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.