the Mises-Fisher distribution

The von Mises-Fisher distribution is a probability model used to describe the directions of points that are spread out on a sphere, such as locations on Earth’s surface or orientations in space. Think of it as the “spread” of data around a preferred direction. If data points tend to cluster around a specific orientation, this distribution characterizes that pattern by indicating the central direction and how tightly points are clustered. It’s widely used in fields like geology, biology, and machine learning for analyzing directional or angular data.