Directional data is ubiquitious in science. Due to its circular nature such data cannot
be analyzed with commonly used statistical techniques. Despite the rapid development
of specialized methods for directional statistics over the last fty years, there is only little
software available that makes such methods easy to use for practioners. Most importantly,
one of the most commonly used programming languages in biosciences, MATLAB,
is currently not supporting directional statistics. To remedy this situation, we have implemented
the CircStat toolbox for MATLAB which provides methods for the descriptive
and inferential statistical analysis of directional data. We cover the statistical background
of the available methods and describe how to apply them to data. Finally, we analyze a
dataset from neurophysiology to demonstrate the capabilities of the CircStat toolbox
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