U-Statistics on the spherical poisson space

We review a recent stream of research on normal approximations for linear functionals and more general U-statistics of wavelets/needlets coefficients evaluated on a homogeneous spherical Poisson field. We show how, by exploiting results from Peccati and Zheng (Electron J Probab 15(48):1487-1527, 2010) based on Malliavin calculus and Stein's method, it is possible to assess the rate of convergence to Gaussianity for a triangular array of statistics with growing dimensions. These results can be exploited in a number of statistical applications, such as spherical density estimations, searching for point sources, estimation of variance, and the spherical two-sample problem.