To be published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4847, 2002, "Astronomical Data Analysis II," J.-L. Stark and F. Murtagh, eds.

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Abstract. The main tools in cosmology for comparing theoretical models with the observations of the galaxy distribution are statistical. We will review the applications of spatial statistics to the description of the large-scale structure of the universe. Special topics discussed in this talk will be: description of the galaxy samples, selection effects and biases, correlation functions, Fourier analysis, nearest neighbor statistics, Minkowski functionals and structure statistics. Special attention will be devoted to scaling laws and the use of the lacunarity measures in the description of the cosmic texture.

Key words: galaxies: statistics, large-scale structure of universe, methods: statistical, methods: data analysis, surveys

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• OBSERVATIONS OF THE GALAXY CLUSTERING
• Distances
• Recent redshift surveys
• Selection effects
• CORRELATIONS
• The two-point correlation function
• (r) on recent samples
• Fractal scaling
• Lacunarity
• POWER SPECTRUM
• OTHER CLUSTERING MEASURES
• REFERENCES