Model selection versus traditional hypothesis testing in circular statistics : a simulation study
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Date
23/06/2020Keywords
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Abstract
Many studies in biology involve data measured on a circular scale. Such data require different statistical treatment from those measured on linear scales. The most common statistical exploration of circular data involves testing the null hypothesis that the data show no aggregation and are instead uniformly distributed over the whole circle. The most common means of performing this type of investigation is with a Rayleigh test. An alternative might be to compare the fit of the uniform distribution model to alternative models. Such model-fitting approaches have become a standard technique with linear data, and their greater application to circular data has been recently advocated. Here we present simulation data that demonstrate that such model-based inference can offer very similar performance to the best traditional tests, but only if adjustment is made in order to control type I error rate.
Citation
Landler , L , Ruxton , G D & Malkemper , E P 2020 , ' Model selection versus traditional hypothesis testing in circular statistics : a simulation study ' , Biology Open , vol. 9 , no. 6 , bio049866 . https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.049866
Publication
Biology Open
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2046-2441Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
Description
L.L. was partially funded by the Austrian Science Fund [FWF, grant number: P32586].Collections
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