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kjetil b halvorsen
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Uniformly sampling surface of an ellipsoid using multivariate Gaussian

Sampling uniformly from the surface of an ellipsoid (in the sense of $\mu(dA) = \frac{1}{A}$) seems very nontrivial:

with most suggesting rejection sampling.

On the other hand, a common approach for sampling on the $d$-sphere uses the spherical symmetry of the standard multivariate Gaussian to use $\frac{v}{||v||}$. More generally, for a zero-mean multivariate Gaussian with covariance $\Sigma$, the ellipsoids $$ v^\intercal \Sigma^{-1}v = c^2 $$ are sets of constant density. Yet, the following naive approach does not work (I assume due to inhomogeneous change in the area element):

$v \sim \mathcal{N}(0, \Sigma)$, construct samples $x = \frac{v}{\sqrt{v^\intercal \Sigma^{-1}v}}$

Yet, can we not use the level sets of a multivariate gaussian somehow to sample an ellipsoid uniformly without rejection?