Generating pseudo-random data is important for many aspects of research work. QGIS provides for many methods of generating random points to facilitate this.
Recently, I ran into a problem where I wanted to generate random points inside a polygon – but I wanted the random points to have a certain distribution. I wanted to generate a dataset showing employee home locations for a company. Given a city boundary and the location of office, I wanted to have a point layer that showed where the employees lived. A simple ‘Random points within Polygon’ algorithm would not work here, since the distribution of points would not be uniform within the city.
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