Skew-symmetric approximations of posterior distributions
后验分布的偏斜对称近似
Abstract Popular deterministic approximations of posterior distributions from, e.g. the Laplace method, variational Bayes and expectation-propagation, generally rely on symmetric families, often taken to be Gaussian. This choice facilitates optimization and inference, but typically affects the quality of the approximation. In fact, even in basic parametric models, posterior distributions often display asymmetries that yield bias and reduced accuracy when considering…