Directional

7.7

A Collection of Functions for Directional Data Analysis

4packages depend

12.2Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Michail TsagrisFirst published 2015-11-1264 releasesCRAN page ↗

A collection of functions for directional data (including massive data, with millions of observations) analysis. Hypothesis testing, discriminant and regression analysis, MLE of distributions and more are included. The standard textbook for such data is the "Directional Statistics" by Mardia, K. V. and Jupp, P. E. (2000). Other references include: a) Paine J.P., Preston S.P., Tsagris M. and Wood A.T.A. (2018). "An elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian distribution". Statistics and Computing 28(3): 689-697. doi:10.1007/s11222-017-9756-4. b) Tsagris M. and Alenazi A. (2019). "Comparison of discriminant analysis methods on the sphere". Communications in Statistics: Case Studies, Data Analysis and Applications 5(4):467--491. doi:10.1080/23737484.2019.1684854. c) Paine J.P., Preston S.P., Tsagris M. and Wood A.T.A. (2020). "Spherical regression models with general covariates and anisotropic errors". Statistics and Computing 30(1): 153--165. doi:10.1007/s11222-019-09872-2. d) Tsagris M. and Alenazi A. (2024). "An investigation of hypothesis testing procedures for circular and spherical mean vectors". Communications in Statistics-Simulation and Computation, 53(3): 1387--1408. doi:10.1080/03610918.2022.2045499. e) Yu Z. and Huang X. (2024). A new parameterization for elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian distributions of arbitrary dimension. Electronic Journal of Statistics, 18(1): 301--334. doi:10.1214/23-EJS2210. f) Tsagris M. and Alzeley O. (2025). "Circular and spherical projected Cauchy distributions: A Novel Framework for Circular and Directional Data Modeling". Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics, 67(1): 77--103. doi:10.1111/anzs.12434. g) Tsagris M., Papastamoulis P. and Kato S. (2025). "Directional data analysis: spherical Cauchy or Poisson kernel-based distribution". Statistics and Computing, 35:51. doi:10.1007/s11222-025-10583-0. h) Alzeley O. and Tsagris (2026). "On the generalized circular projected Cauchy distribution". Mathematics, 14(11): 1934. doi:10.3390/math14111934.

Install

R (CRAN)Ubuntu (r2u)

install.packages("Directional", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-directional

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 5.1 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 94%
Documented parameters: not tracked
Return-value docs: not tracked
References docs: 96%

Downloads

12.2K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,536 · ~33/day · ~1K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

93230 days

3.2K90 days

12.2K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on185 r2u40 c2d4u

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

13 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (0)

none

Imports (14)

bigstatsr doParallel foreach ggplot2grDevicesmagrittrparallelRfast Rfast2 Rnanoflann rangen rgl rnaturalearth sf

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (1)

bigreadr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

4direct

0indirect

CKNNRLD MLE pgKDEsphere sphereclust

Code & Tests

People & History

People (8)

Maintainer (1)

Michail Tsagris

Author, Maintainer

Authors (4)

Michail Tsagris

Author, Maintainer

Christos Adam

Author · added in 5.1

Giorgos Athineou

Author

Zehao Yu

Author · added in 6.8

Contributors (4)

Eli Amson

Contributor · added in 3.0

Panagiotis Papastamoulis

Contributor · added in 6.9

Anamul Sajib

Contributor · added in 2.0

Micah J. Waldstein

Contributor · added in 3.3

Listed in earlier versions (1)

Waldstein

no longer listed · 6.8 to 7.7

Package Timeline

64 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

7.7Latest
2026-07-21 · current release · diff ↗
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R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
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R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
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R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
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1.0
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R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16

Package metadata

First published: 2015-11-12
Total releases: 64 / 11 yrs
License: GPL (>= 2) OSI
Download size: 163 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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