Abstract

Most of the tractable distributions currently available for modeling circular data are symmetric around a modal direction, prominent among them the von Mises distribution. Here we discuss a method of introducing asymmetry into any such symmetric circular model and develop general classes of non-symmetric circular distributions. In particular, we introduce and study a resulting variation of the classical von Mises distribution, along with a biological application. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.