Description
Advances in directional statistics (AdvDS) is an emerging research group from the Department of Statistics, University of Pretoria. Our focus is in pioneering innovative methodologies and applications in directional statistics. Directional statistics is a branch of statistics dedicated towards the analysis of data observed on a circle, sphere or higher-dimensional manifolds such as hypersphere, hypertorus or hypercylinder.  Some examples of directional data are wind direction, solar orientation, dihedral angles in 3D structure of proteins and the turning angle of an animal. Like any data, directional data often exhibits heterogeneity, outliers multimodality and skewness. In this research group, we develop new methods to address these issues. 

Our research can be applied in areas such as meteorology to study wind direction, oceanography to study the direction of water flow in oceans and rivers, ecology to study the animal movement, bioinformatics to study the 3D structure of proteins, and earth science to study the direction of seismic waves or the orientation of fault lines, among other many applications.

Collaborators
UP Staff and Students acting as Principal Investigators include:
Najmeh Nakhaeirad
Sphiwe Skhosana
Andriette Bekker
Thasmika Mohan 
Claudio Jardim

International collaborators:
Christophe Ley (University of Luxembourg)
Yaser Samadi (Southern Illinois University)
Vrijesh Tripathi (University of the West Indies)
Arnab Sarkar (Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi)
 

Impact of our research
Our research links to the following UN SDGs:
SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy
SDG 14: Life below water
SDG 15: Life on land