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Directional data appears in several branches of research. In some cases, those directional variables are only defined in subsets of the K-dimensional unit sphere. For example, in some applications, angles as measured responses are limited on the positive orthant. Analysis on subsets of the K-dimensional unit sphere is challenging and nowadays there are not many proposals that discuss this topic. Thus, from a methodological point of view, it is important to have probability distributions defined on bounded subsets of the K-dimensional unit sphere. Specifically, in this paper, we introduce a nonparametric Bayesian model to describe directional variables restricted to the first orthant. This model is based on a Dirichlet process mixture model with multivariate projected Gamma densities as kernel distributions. We show how to carry out inference for the proposed model based on a slice sampling scheme. The proposed methodology is illustrated using simulated data sets as well as a real data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of some real phenomena involve directional variables that by their nature are defined only in certain subsets of the k-dimensional unit sphere, S k. For example, when working with axial data, the support of the associated directional variables turns out to be the interval (0 , π ]. Thus, from a methodological point of view it is important to have probability distributions defined in bounded subsets of S k. Specifically, in order to describe directional variables restricted to the first orthant, in this paper we introduce the Multivariate Projected Gamma model (MPG). This model is flexible enough and treats observations as projections onto the unit sphere of unobserved responses from a multivariate distribution which is generated as a product of k independent univariate Gamma distributions. Inference about the parameters of the model is based on samples from the corresponding joint posterior density, which is obtained using a Gibbs sampling after the introduction of suitable latent variables. The proposed methodology is illustrated using simulated data sets as well as a real data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]