A family of toroidal diffusions with exact likelihood inference

E García-Portugués and M Sørensen

Biometrika, 2026, vol. 113, issue 1, asaf050.

Abstract: We provide a class of diffusion processes for continuous time-varying multivariate angular data with explicit transition probability densities, enabling exact likelihood inference. The presented diffusions are time reversible and can be constructed for any prespecified stationary distribution on the torus, including highly multimodal mixtures. We give results on asymptotic likelihood theory, allowing one-sample inference and tests of linear hypotheses forgroups of diffusions, including homogeneity. We show that exact and direct diffusion bridge simulation is possible too. A class of circular jump processes with similar properties is also proposed. Several numerical experiments illustrate the methodology for the circular and two-dimensional torus cases. The new family of diffusions is applied (i) to test several homogeneity hypotheses on the movement of ants and (ii) to simulate bridges between the three-dimensional backbones of two related proteins.

Keywords: Angular data; Diffusion bridge; Stochastic process; Torus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/biomet/asaf050 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:biomet:v:113:y:2026:i:1:p:asaf050.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Biometrika is currently edited by Paul Fearnhead

More articles in Biometrika from Biometrika Trust Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().