  Spectral sampling is associated with the group of unitary transformations
acting on matrices in much the same way that simple random sampling is
associated with the symmetric group acting on vectors. This parallel extends to
symmetric functions, k-statistics and polykays. We construct spectral
k-statistics as unbiased estimators of cumulants of trace powers of a suitable
random matrix. Moreover we define normalized spectral polykays in such a way
that when the sampling is from an infinite population they return products of
free cumulants.
