Skip to contents

Rayleigh test for a preferred direction

Source: R/stats-circular.R
rayleighTest.Rd

Tests the null hypothesis that the angles are uniformly distributed on the circle (no preferred direction) against a unimodal concentration. A small p-value means the angles cluster around a mean direction – e.g. that a coupling angle is consistently in-phase rather than random.

Usage

rayleighTest(angles, units = c("degrees", "radians"))

Arguments

angles

Numeric vector of angles.

units

"degrees" (default) or "radians".

Value

an htest: Rayleigh Z = n * rbar^2, p.value (Zar 1999 approximation), and the estimated mean direction.

References

Zar JH (1999) eq. 27.2-27.4; Fisher NI (1993).

See also

circularSummary(), watsonWilliamsTest()

Examples

set.seed(1)
rayleighTest(rnorm(40, mean = 30, sd = 12))$p.value   # clustered -> small
#> [1] 4.257975e-16