A Note on Spherical Needlets

Compared with the traditional spherical harmonics, the spherical needlets are a new generation of spherical wavelets that possess several attractive properties. Their double localization in both spatial and frequency domains empowers them to easily and sparsely represent functions with small spatial scale features. This paper is divided into two parts. First, it reviews the spherical harmonics and discusses their limitations in representing functions with small spatial scale features. To overcome the limitations, it introduces the spherical needlets and their attractive properties. In the second part of the paper, a Matlab package for the spherical needlets is presented. The properties of the spherical needlets are demonstrated by several examples using the package.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, technical repor

A Note on Global Suprema of Band-Limited Spherical Random Functions

In this note, we investigate the behaviour of suprema for band-limited spherical random fields. We prove upper and lower bound for the expected values of these suprema, by means of metric entropy arguments and discrete approximations; we then exploit the Borell-TIS inequality to establish almost sure upper and lower bounds for their fluctuations. Band limited functions can be viewed as restrictions on the sphere of random polynomials with increasing degrees, and our results show that fluctuations scale as the square root of the logarithm of these degrees

Asymptotic Uncorrelation for Mexican Needlets

We recall Mexican needlets from [5]. We derive an estimate for certain types of Legendre series, which we apply to the statistical properties of Mexican needlets. More precisely, we shall show that, under isotropy and Gaussianity assumptions, the Mexican needlet coefficients of a random field on the sphere are asymptotically uncorrelated, as the frequency parameter goes to infinity. This property is important in the analysis of cosmic microwave background radiation.Comment: 13 page

On the computation of directional scale-discretized wavelet transforms on the sphere

We review scale-discretized wavelets on the sphere, which are directional and allow one to probe oriented structure in data defined on the sphere. Furthermore, scale-discretized wavelets allow in practice the exact synthesis of a signal from its wavelet coefficients. We present exact and efficient algorithms to compute the scale-discretized wavelet transform of band-limited signals on the sphere. These algorithms are implemented in the publicly available S2DW code. We release a new version of S2DW that is parallelized and contains additional code optimizations. Note that scale-discretized wavelets can be viewed as a directional generalization of needlets. Finally, we outline future improvements to the algorithms presented, which can be achieved by exploiting a new sampling theorem on the sphere developed recently by some of the authors.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of Wavelets and Sparsity XV, SPIE Optics and Photonics 2013, Code is publicly available at http://www.s2dw.org

Quantitative central limit theorems for Mexican needlet coefficients on circular Poisson fields

The aim of this paper is to establish rates of convergence to Gaussianity for wavelet coefficients on circular Poisson random fields. This result is established by using the Stein-Malliavin techniques introduced by Peccati and Zheng (2011) and the concentration properties of so-called Mexican needlets on the circleComment: 26 pages, 4 figure

Bayesian Estimation of Intensity Surfaces on the Sphere via Needlet Shrinkage and Selection

This paper describes an approach for Bayesian modeling in spherical datasets. Our method is based upon a recent construction called the needlet, which is a particular form of spherical wavelet with many favorable statistical and computational properties. We perform shrinkage and selection of needlet coefficients, focusing on two main alternatives: empirical-Bayes thresholding, and Bayesian local shrinkage rules. We study the performance of the proposed methodology both on simulated data and on two real data sets: one involving the cosmic microwave background radiation, and one involving the reconstruction of a global news intensity surface inferred from published Reuters articles in August, 1996. The fully Bayesian approach based on robust, sparse shrinkage priors seems to outperform other alternatives.Business Administratio

Asymptotics for spherical needlets

We investigate invariant random fields on the sphere using a new type of spherical wavelets, called needlets. These are compactly supported in frequency and enjoy excellent localization properties in real space, with quasi-exponentially decaying tails. We show that, for random fields on the sphere, the needlet coefficients are asymptotically uncorrelated for any fixed angular distance. This property is used to derive CLT and functional CLT convergence results for polynomial functionals of the needlet coefficients: here the asymptotic theory is considered in the high-frequency sense. Our proposals emerge from strong empirical motivations, especially in connection with the analysis of cosmological data sets.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS601 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org