Na Zhang

• The main purpose of the study was to improve the physical properties of the modelling of compressed materials, especially fibrous materials. Fibrous materials are finding increasing application in the industries. And most of the materials are compressed for different applications. For such situation, we are interested in how the fibre arranged, e.g. with which distribution. For given materials it is possible to obtain a three-dimensional image via micro computed tomography. Since some physical parameters, e.g. the fibre lengths or the directions for points in the fibre, can be checked under some other methods from image, it is beneficial to improve the physical properties by changing the parameters in the image. In this thesis, we present a new maximum-likelihood approach for the estimation of parameters of a parametric distribution on the unit sphere, which is various as some well known distributions, e.g. the von-Mises Fisher distribution or the Watson distribution, and for some models better fit. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum-likelihood estimator are proven. As the second main part of this thesis, a general model of mixtures of these distributions on a hypersphere is discussed. We derive numerical approximations of the parameters in an Expectation Maximization setting. Furthermore we introduce a non-parametric estimation of the EM algorithm for the mixture model. Finally, we present some applications to the statistical analysis of fibre composites.