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Main Authors: Shyntar, Alexandra, Hillen, Thomas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09851
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author Shyntar, Alexandra
Hillen, Thomas
author_facet Shyntar, Alexandra
Hillen, Thomas
contents Spherical distributions, in particular, the von Mises-Fisher distribution, are often used for problems using or modelling directional data. Since expectation and variance-covariance matrices follow from the first and second moments of the spherical distribution, the moments often need to be approximated numerically by computing trigonometric integrals. Here, we derive the explicit forms of the first and second moments for an n-dimensional von Mises-Fisher and peanut distributions by making use of the divergence theorem in the calculations. The derived formulas can be easily used in simulations, significantly decreasing the computation time. Moreover, we compute the fractional anisotropy formulas for the diffusion tensors derived from the bimodal von Mises-Fisher and peanut distributions, and show that the peanut distribution is limited in the amount of anisotropy it permits, making the von Mises-Fisher distribution a better choice when modelling anisotropy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09851
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle First and Second Moments and Fractional Anisotropy of General von Mises-Fisher and Peanut Distributions
Shyntar, Alexandra
Hillen, Thomas
Methodology
Probability
Spherical distributions, in particular, the von Mises-Fisher distribution, are often used for problems using or modelling directional data. Since expectation and variance-covariance matrices follow from the first and second moments of the spherical distribution, the moments often need to be approximated numerically by computing trigonometric integrals. Here, we derive the explicit forms of the first and second moments for an n-dimensional von Mises-Fisher and peanut distributions by making use of the divergence theorem in the calculations. The derived formulas can be easily used in simulations, significantly decreasing the computation time. Moreover, we compute the fractional anisotropy formulas for the diffusion tensors derived from the bimodal von Mises-Fisher and peanut distributions, and show that the peanut distribution is limited in the amount of anisotropy it permits, making the von Mises-Fisher distribution a better choice when modelling anisotropy.
title First and Second Moments and Fractional Anisotropy of General von Mises-Fisher and Peanut Distributions
topic Methodology
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09851