In statistics, the Bingham distribution, named after Christopher Bingham, is an antipodally symmetric probability distribution on the n-sphere.
The Bingham distribution is widely used in paleomagnetic data analysis,[2] and has been used in the field of computer vision.
[3][4][5] Its probability density function is given by which may also be written where x is an axis (i.e., a unit vector), M is an orthogonal orientation matrix, Z is a diagonal concentration matrix, and
is a confluent hypergeometric function of matrix argument.
The matrices M and Z are the result of diagonalizing the positive-definite covariance matrix of the Gaussian distribution that underlies the Bingham distribution.