Generate a random sample of points distributed on the surface of a unit sphere

Question

I am trying to generate random points on the surface of the sphere using numpy. I have reviewed the post that explains uniform distribution here. However, need ideas on how

Answer 1

Following some discussion with @Soonts I got curious about the performance of the three approaches used in the answers: one with generating random angles, one using normally distributed coordinates, and one rejecting uniformly distributed points.

Here's my attempted comparison:

import numpy as np

def sample_trig(npoints):
    theta = 2*np.pi*np.random.rand(npoints)
    phi = np.arccos(2*np.random.rand(npoints)-1)
    x = np.cos(theta) * np.sin(phi)
    y = np.sin(theta) * np.sin(phi)
    z = np.cos(phi)
    return np.array([x,y,z])

def sample_normals(npoints):
    vec = np.random.randn(3, npoints)
    vec /= np.linalg.norm(vec, axis=0)
    return vec

def sample_reject(npoints):
    vec = np.zeros((3,npoints))
    abc = 2*np.random.rand(3,npoints)-1
    norms = np.linalg.norm(abc,axis=0) 
    mymask = norms<=1
    abc = abc[:,mymask]/norms[mymask]
    k = abc.shape[1]
    vec[:,0:k] = abc
    while k

Then for 1000 points

In [449]: timeit sample_trig(1000)
1000 loops, best of 3: 236 µs per loop

In [450]: timeit sample_normals(1000)
10000 loops, best of 3: 172 µs per loop

In [451]: timeit sample_reject(1000)
100 loops, best of 3: 13.7 ms per loop

Note that in the rejection-based implementation I first generated npoints samples and threw away the bad ones, and I only used a loop to generate the rest of the points. It seemed to be the case that the direct step-by-step rejection takes a longer amount of time. I also removed the check for division-by-zero to have a cleaner comparison with the sample_normals case.

---

Removing vectorization from the two direct methods puts them into the same ballpark:

def sample_trig_loop(npoints):
    x = np.zeros(npoints)
    y = np.zeros(npoints)
    z = np.zeros(npoints)
    for k in range(npoints):
        theta = 2*np.pi*np.random.rand()
        phi = np.arccos(2*np.random.rand()-1)
        x[k] = np.cos(theta) * np.sin(phi)
        y[k] = np.sin(theta) * np.sin(phi)
        z[k] = np.cos(phi)
    return np.array([x,y,z])

def sample_normals_loop(npoints):
    vec = np.zeros((3,npoints))
    for k in range(npoints):
      tvec = np.random.randn(3)
      vec[:,k] = tvec/np.linalg.norm(tvec)
    return vec

In [464]: timeit sample_trig(1000)
1000 loops, best of 3: 236 µs per loop

In [465]: timeit sample_normals(1000)
10000 loops, best of 3: 173 µs per loop

In [466]: timeit sample_reject(1000)
100 loops, best of 3: 14 ms per loop

In [467]: timeit sample_trig_loop(1000)
100 loops, best of 3: 7.92 ms per loop

In [468]: timeit sample_normals_loop(1000)
100 loops, best of 3: 10.9 ms per loop