No Arabic abstract
Two frameworks that have been used to characterize reflected diffusions include stochastic differential equations with reflection and the so-called submartingale problem. We introduce a general formulation of the submartingale problem for (obliquely) reflected diffusions in domains with piecewise C^2 boundaries and piecewise continuous reflection vector fields. Under suitable assumptions, we show that well-posedness of the submartingale problem is equivalent to existence and uniqueness in law of weak solutions to the corresponding stochastic differential equation with reflection. Our result generalizes to the case of reflecting diffusions a classical result due to Stroock and Varadhan on the equivalence of well-posedness of martingale problems and well-posedness of weak solutions of stochastic differential equations in d-dimensional Euclidean space. The analysis in the case of reflected diffusions in domains with non-smooth boundaries is considerably more subtle and requires a careful analysis of the behavior of the reflected diffusion on the boundary of the domain. In particular, the equivalence can fail to hold when our assumptions are not satisfied. The equivalence we establish allows one to transfer results on reflected diffusions characterized by one approach to reflected diffusions analyzed by the other approach. As an application, we provide a characterization of stationary distributions of a large class of reflected diffusions in convex polyhedral domains.
Reflected diffusions in convex polyhedral domains arise in a variety of applications, including interacting particle systems, queueing networks, biochemical reaction networks and mathematical finance. Under suitable conditions on the data, we establish pathwise differentiability of such a reflected diffusion with respect to its defining parameters --- namely, its initial condition, drift and diffusion coefficients, and (oblique) directions of reflection along the boundary of the domain. We characterize the right-continuous regularization of a pathwise derivative of the reflected diffusion as the pathwise unique solution to a constrained linear stochastic differential equation with jumps whose drift and diffusion coefficients, domain and directions of reflection depend on the state of the reflected diffusion. The proof of this result relies on properties of directional derivatives of the associated (extended) Skorokhod reflection map and their characterization in terms of a so-called derivative problem, and also involves establishing certain path properties of the reflected diffusion at nonsmooth parts of the boundary of the polyhedral domain, which may be of independent interest. As a corollary, we obtain a probabilistic representation for derivatives of expectations of functionals of reflected diffusions, which is useful for sensitivity analysis of reflected diffusions.
In this work we develop an effective Monte Carlo method for estimating sensitivities, or gradients of expectations of sufficiently smooth functionals, of a reflected diffusion in a convex polyhedral domain with respect to its defining parameters --- namely, its initial condition, drift and diffusion coefficients, and directions of reflection. Our method, which falls into the class of infinitesimal perturbation analysis (IPA) methods, uses a probabilistic representation for such sensitivities as the expectation of a functional of the reflected diffusion and its associated derivative process. The latter process is the unique solution to a constrained linear stochastic differential equation with jumps whose coefficients, domain and directions of reflection are modulated by the reflected diffusion. We propose an asymptotically unbiased estimator for such sensitivities using an Euler approximation of the reflected diffusion and its associated derivative process. Proving that the Euler approximation converges is challenging because the derivative process jumps whenever the reflected diffusion hits the boundary (of the domain). A key step in the proof is establishing a continuity property of the related derivative map, which is of independent interest. We compare the performance of our IPA estimator to a standard likelihood ratio estimator (whenever the latter is applicable), and provide numerical evidence that the variance of the former is substantially smaller than that of the latter. We illustrate our method with an example of a rank-based interacting diffusion model of equity markets. Interestingly, we show that estimating certain sensitivities of the rank-based interacting diffusion model using our method for a reflected Brownian motion description of the model outperforms a finite difference method for a stochastic differential equation description of the model.
Given a domain G, a reflection vector field d(.) on the boundary of G, and drift and dispersion coefficients b(.) and sigma(.), let L be the usual second-order elliptic operator associated with b(.) and sigma(.). Under suitable assumptions that, in particular, ensure that the associated submartingale problem is well posed, it is shown that a probability measure $pi$ on bar{G} is a stationary distribution for the corresponding reflected diffusion if and only if $pi (partial G) = 0$ and $int_{bar{G}} L f (x) pi (dx) leq 0$ for every f in a certain class of test functions. Moreover, the assumptions are shown to be satisfied by a large class of reflected diffusions in piecewise smooth multi-dimensional domains with possibly oblique reflection.
Conductivity equation is studied in piecewise smooth plane domains and with measure-valued current patterns (Neumann boundary values). This allows one to extend the recently introduced concept of bisweep data to piecewise smooth domains, which yields a new partial data result for Calderon inverse conductivity problem. It is also shown that bisweep data are (up to a constant scaling factor) the Schwartz kernel of the relative Neumann-to-Dirichlet map. A numerical method for reconstructing the supports of inclusions from discrete bisweep data is also presented.
A limit theorem for a sequence of diffusion processes on graphs is proved in a case when vary both parameters of the processes (the drift and diffusion coefficients on every edge and the asymmetry coefficients in every vertex), and configuration of graphs, where the processes are set on. The explicit formulae for the parameters of asymmetry for the vertices of the limiting graph are given in the case, when, in the pre-limiting graphs, some groups of vertices form knots contracting into a points.