Comparing measures of fit for circular distributions
Date
2010-05-04T15:55:29Z
Authors
Sun, Zheng
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Abstract
This thesis shows how to test the fit of a data set to a number of different models, using Watson’s U2 statistic for both grouped and continuous data. While Watson’s U2 statistic was introduced for continuous data, in recent work, the statistic has been adapted for grouped data. However, when using Watson’s U2 for continuous data, the asymptotic distribution is difficult to obtain, particularly, for some skewed circular distributions that contain four or five parameters. Until now, U2 asymptotic points are worked out only for uniform distribution and the von Mises distribution among all circular distributions. We give U2 asymptotic points for the wrapped exponential distributions, and we show that U2 asymptotic points when data are grouped is usually easier to obtain for other more advanced circular distributions.
In practice, all continuous data is grouped into cells whose width is decided by the accuracy of the measurement. It will be found useful to treat such data as grouped with sufficient number of cells in the examples to be analyzed. When the data are
treated as grouped, asymptotic points for U2 match well with the points when the data are treated as continuous. Asymptotic theory for U2 adopted for grouped data is given in the thesis. Monte Carlo studies show that, for reasonable sample sizes, the asymptotic points will give good approximations to the p-values of the test.
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Keywords
Goodness-of-fit, Watson's Statistic, Circular distributions, Maximum likelihood estimation, grouped data, parametric bootstrap