On the error in Laplace approximations of high-dimensional integrals

Abstract

Laplace approximations are commonly used to approximate high-dimensional integrals in statistical applications, but the quality of such approximations as the dimension of the integral grows is not well understood. In this paper, we prove a new result on the size of the error in first- and higher-order Laplace approximations, and apply this result to investigate the quality of Laplace approximations to the likelihood in some generalized linear mixed models.