Non-uniform random numbers | Pseudorandom number generators
Ratio of uniforms
The ratio of uniforms is a method initially proposed by Kinderman and Monahan in 1977 for pseudo-random number sampling, that is, for drawing random samples from a statistical distribution. Like rejection sampling and inverse transform sampling, it is an exact simulation method. The basic idea of the method is to use a change of variables to create a bounded set, which can then be sampled uniformly to generate random variables following the original distribution. One feature of this method is that the distribution to sample is only required to be known up to an unknown multiplicative factor, a common situation in computational statistics and statistical physics. (Wikipedia).
