sphstat: A Python package for inferential statistics on vectorial data on the unit sphere

Abstract

Data that resides on the surface of a 2-sphere is common in various scientific fields, including physics, earth sciences, astronomy, and psychoacoustics. While some tools and packages exist for performing inferential statistical tests on such data and model fitting, there is currently no comprehensive open-source Python package that implements these tests. sphstat aims to fill this gap by providing an open-source Python package that implements spherical inferential tests and some model-fitting algorithms as catalogued in the authoritative reference by Fisher et al. (1993). Due to the lack of a similar open-source Python package, sphstat has the potential to be widely used in scientific and technical fields where data on the 2-sphere emerges.

Keywords

• Spherical data
• Inferential statistics
• Hypothesis testing
• Goodness-of-fit
• Spherical regression