Fitting an ellipsoid to 3D data points

Question

I have a large set of 3D data points to which I want to fit to an ellipsoid.

My maths is pretty poor, so I\'m having trouble implementing the least squares method withou

Answer 1

If you want the minimum-volume enclosing ellipsoid, check out this SO answer for a bounding ellipsoid.

If you want the best fitting ellipse in a least-squares sense, check out this MATLAB code for error ellipsoids where you find the covariance matrix of your mean-shifted 3D points and use that to construct the ellipsoid.