TITLE: Convert a normal (gaussian) 2D ellipsoid distribution into 2D circular distribution.
QUESTION [1 upvotes]: In my experimental data analysis I have a 2D scatter plot (x,y) which looks ellipsoid 
(like this). From the underlying physics, I know this distribution should be a circular 2d gaussian (i.e, sigma_x and sigma_y should be the same). But due to experimental detector bias, the measured distribution is ellipsoidal and more to the trouble it is not aligned to X or Y axis (non zero covariance). 
Now I have to do some correction to this data, to make it circular. One way is to divide the each value (x,y) by corresponding sigmas (xnew = x/sigma_x, ynew = y/sigma_y), but that would have been easier if there was no covariance.
 So, please help me how to correct this (x,y) distribution so that the corrected distribution becomes circular. 
How do I calculate the sigma_x,sigma_y, and covariance from the distribution of the x,y points, and then how do I apply the shift for each x,y entry to make a new 2d scatter plot where it becomes circle. 
Many thanks,

REPLY [0 votes]: The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is what you're looking for.
If $A \in \mathbb R^{n \times m}$ is the matrix where each row contains a data vector you can decompose it as $A=USV^*$ where $U \in \mathbb R^{n \times n}, V \in \mathbb R^{m \times m}$ both orthogonal matrices and $S \in \mathbb R^{n \times m}$ is a diagonal matrix. Define $\tilde S$ as another diagonal matrix of the same size as $S$ by replacing the nonzero entries of $S$ by a constant. Then you can get back the transformed data by evaluating $\tilde A = U\tilde SV^*$
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