Circular Bernstein polynomial distributions

This paper introduces a new non-parametric approach to the modeling of circular data, based on the use of Bernstein polynomial densities which generalizes the standard Bernstein polynomial model to account for the specific characteristics of circular data. It is shown that the trigonometric moments of the proposed circular Bernstein polynomial distribution can all be derived in closed form. We comment on how to fit the Bernstein polynomial density approximation to a sample of data and illustrate our approach with a real data example.