R: Mean Direction

mean.circular {circular} | R Documentation

## Mean Direction

### Description

Returns the mean direction of a vector of circular data.

### Usage

    ## S3 method for class 'circular'
    mean(x, na.rm=FALSE, control.circular=list(), ...)

### Arguments

`x` | a vector. The object is coerced to class `circular`.
`na.rm` | logical, indicating if `NA`'s should be omitted.
`control.circular` | the attribute of the resulting object.
`...` | further arguments passed to or from other methods.

### Details

Each observation is treated as a unit vector, or point on the unit circle. The resultant vector of the observations is found, and the direction of the resultant vector is returned. An `NA` is returned if the resultant length (see `rho.circular`) is less than `.Machine`

### Value

Returns the mean direction of the data as an object of class `circular` with the attribute given by `control.circular` or from `x` if missed in `control.circular`.

### Author(s)

Claudio Agostinelli and Ulric Lund

### References

Jammalamadaka, S. Rao and SenGupta, A. (2001). Topics in Circular Statistics, Section 1.3, World Scientific Press, Singapore.

### See Also

`var.circular`, `summary.circular`, `mle.vonmises`, `rho.circular` and `.Machine`.

### Examples

    # Compute the mean direction of a random sample of observations.
    x <- circular(runif(50, circular(0), pi))
    mean(x)

[Package circular version 0.4-93 Index]