A Bayesian model for longitudinal circular data

The analysis of short longitudinal series of circular data may be problematic and to some extent has not been completely developed. In this paper we present a Bayesian analysis of a model for such data. The model is based on a radial projection onto the circle of a particular bivariate normal distribution. Inferences about the parameters of the model are based on samples from the corresponding joint posterior density which are obtained using a Metropolis-within-Gibbs scheme after the introduction of suitable latent variables. The procedure is illustrated both using a simulated data set and a realdata set previously analyzed in the literature.