In commemoration of the bicentennial of the birth of the "lady who gave the rose diagram to us", this special contributed book pays a statistical tribute to Florence Nightingale. This book presents recent phenomenal developments, both in rigorous theory as well as in emerging methods, for applications in directional statistics, in 25 chapters with contributions from 65 renowned researchers from 25 countries. With the advent of modern techniques in statistical paradigms and statistical machine learning, directional statistics has become an indispensable tool. Ranging from data on circles to that on the spheres, tori and cylinders, this book includes solutions to problems on exploratory data analysis, probability distributions on manifolds, maximum entropy, directional regression analysis, spatio-directional time series, optimal inference, simulation, statistical machine learning with big data, and more, with their innovative applications to emerging real-life problems in astro-statistics, bioinformatics, crystallography, optimal transport, statistical process control, and so on.
