circular (version 0.4-93)

median.circular: Median Direction

Description

Sample median direction for a vector of circular data

Usage

# S3 method for circular
median(x, na.rm = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

x

a vector. The object is coerced to class circular.

na.rm

logical, indicating if NA's should be omitted.

…

NotYetUsed.

Value

A scalar with the circular median value.

The median is returned as an object of class circular.

Details

The Definition in equations 2.32 & 2.33 from N.I. Fisher's 'Statistical Analysis of Circular Data', Cambridge Univ. Press 1993. is implemented. Since version 0.4-4, the algorithm (not the definition) for the calculation of the median is changed. For a measure of spread associated to the circular median use function meandeviation.

References

N.I. Fisher (1993) Statistical Analysis of Circular Data, Cambridge University Press.

R.Y. Liu and K. Singh (1992) Ordering Directional Data: Concepts of Data Depth on Circles and Spheres, The Annals of Statistics, vol. 20, n. 3, 1468-1484.

See Also

meandeviation, mean.circular, var.circular, summary.circular, rho.circular and medianHL.circular.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
# Compute the median direction of a random sample of observations.
x <- circular(runif(50, circular(0), pi))
median(x) #only the median is returned
meandeviation(x) #mean deviation is reported
# }