ASA053
Wishart Variate Generator


ASA053 is a C library which returns samples from the Wishart distribution.

As far as I can tell, there are two mistakes in the printed text of the algorithm; one involves incorrectly determining the number of degrees of freedom for the ChiSquared distribution; the other omits an absolute value sign when inverting the Wilson-Hilferty formula, so that square roots of negative values are occasionally requested. These mistakes have been corrected here.

Source code for many Applied Statistics Algorithms is available through STATLIB.

Licensing:

The computer code and data files made available on this web page are distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

Languages:

ASA053 is available in a C version and a C++ version and a FORTRAN90 version and a MATLAB version and a Python version.

Related Data and Programs:

asa053_test

WISHART, a C library which produces sample matrices from the Wishart or Bartlett distributions, useful for sampling random covariance matrices.

Reference:

  1. Stanley Sawyer,
    Wishart Distributions and Inverse-Wishart Sampling,
    Washington University,
    30 April 2007, 12 pages.
  2. William Smith, Ronald Hocking,
    Algorithm AS 53, Wishart Variate Generator,
    Applied Statistics,
    Volume 21, Number 3, pages 341-345, 1972.

Source Code:


Last revised on 28 October 2018.