The Hermans-Rasson test as a powerful alternative to the Rayleigh test for circular statistics in biology

BMC Ecology
Lukas LandlerE Pascal Malkemper

Abstract

Circular data are gathered in diverse fields of science where measured traits are cyclical in nature: such as compass directions or times of day. The most common statistical question asked of a sample of circular data is whether the data seems to be drawn from a uniform distribution or one that is concentrated around one or more preferred directions. The overwhelmingly most-popular test of the null hypothesis of uniformity is the Rayleigh test, even though this test is known to have very low power in some circumstances. Here we present simulation studies evaluating the performance of tests developed as alternatives to the Rayleigh test. The results of our simulations demonstrate that a single test, the Hermans and Rasson test is almost as powerful as the Rayleigh test in unimodal situations (when the Rayleigh test does well) but substantially outperforms the Rayleigh test in multimodal situations. We recommend researchers switch to routine use of the new Hermans and Rasson test. We also demonstrate that all available tests have low power to detect departures from uniformity involving more than two concentrated regions: we recommend that where researchers suspect such complex departures that they collect substantially-sized samp...Continue Reading

References

Mar 1, 1981·Biology of Reproduction·T Kawarabayashi, J M Marshall
Sep 2, 2017·The Journal of Experimental Biology·Robert R Fitak, Sönke Johnsen
Nov 17, 2017·Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology·Rosalind K Humphreys, Graeme D Ruxton
Aug 14, 2018·Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology·Lukas LandlerE Pascal Malkemper

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Citations

Dec 2, 2020·Animals : an Open Access Journal From MDPI·Fructueux G A HoungbégnonJean-Louis Doucet
Mar 7, 2021·Animals : an Open Access Journal From MDPI·Andrea VivianoWalid Fathy Mohamed

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Software Mentioned

circular in
R package
mathop
R
NPCirc
package

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