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R

radiatR

INFRA · APIS
Velocity2.5

Analysis and Visualisation of Headings and Trajectories on the unit disk

github.com/JohnKirwan/radiatR ↗

A circular-statistics toolkit for animal movement, shipped and then tightened in three weeks.

circular-statisticsanimal-movementr-packageshiny-appfirst-release
◆Current state
radiatR reads movement trajectories, plots them on circular axes, computes kinematics such as speed and path sinuosity, and runs the circular statistics that go with them, including tests of mean direction, symmetry and unimodality. It arrived as a first public release on 9 July 2026 with an accompanying Shiny app, and has had two releases since at roughly weekly intervals. The 0.1.x line is still setting its boundaries: 0.1.2 removes a loader dialect and makes previously silent data problems into errors.
◆Where it's heading
Three releases in twelve days show a package hardening in public rather than accreting features. The direction of travel is toward refusing bad input instead of quietly working around it: non-finite coordinate rows now error by default rather than being dropped silently, combining Tracks objects rejects colliding trajectory ids and conflicting calibration metadata instead of merging them and discarding one side, and the Shiny app clears prior state before reading a new upload. The statistical surface is growing in parallel, but within the scope the first release already claimed.
◆Prediction
Expect the remaining goodness-of-fit gap the notes name explicitly, Jones-Pewsey, to be filled in a later release, and the error-on-bad-input treatment to reach the parts of the loader it has not yet covered. A CRAN submission is the natural next step for a package this young, though nothing in these entries commits to one.

◆Recent moves

  1. 29d ago

    ctrax loader dropped; bad coordinates now error by default

    Removes the ctrax dialect and its .mat support, with pre-computed orientation angles left to the general heading rule, and turns several silent behaviours into errors: non-finite coordinate rows, colliding trajectory ids when combining Tracks, and conflicting frame-rate or scale metadata that used to be merged with one side discarded. Breaking, but the kind of narrowing a package does while its interface is still young.

    View source ↗
  2. 1mo ago

    Wrapped-Cauchy and Pycke tests close two statistical gaps

    Adds a wrapped-Cauchy goodness-of-fit test and the Pycke omnibus uniformity test, both filling named gaps in the test catalogue the first release laid out, plus a group-comparison card in the app that runs mean-direction, concentration and distribution tests across a grouping column. More tests for tasks the package already covers, rather than a new kind of analysis.

    View source ↗
  3. 1mo ago

    First public release

    ⚡ SPARK

    The package enters distribution with its full intended scope already present: Tracks construction with absolute and relative coordinate frames, circular plotting with axial overlays and boxplots, kinematics, circular and concentration regression with model selection, and a deployed Shiny app. Everything since has been narrowing and hardening this surface rather than extending it.

    View source ↗