B0676
Title: A geodesic normal distribution on the sphere with elliptical contours
Authors: Jose E Chacon - Universidad de Extremadura (Spain) [presenting]
Andrea Meilan-Vila - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
Abstract: The classical von Mises-Fisher distribution on the sphere belongs to the class of so-called extrinsic normal distributions since it is based on the Euclidean distance inherited by the sphere when embedded in the 3-dimensional Euclidean space. More recently, intrinsic spherical normal distributions have been proposed, which rely instead on the more natural geodesic distance on the sphere, that takes into account its curvature. The isotropic versions of these geodesic normal distributions are intrinsically defined on the sphere, but it is necessary to project on the tangent space to define their anisotropic counterparts. A new geodesic normal distribution on the sphere is introduced, defined in a fully intrinsic way, whose density level sets are true spherical ellipses (so that it can be considered to be anisotropic).
