No Arabic abstract
We propose a hybrid method for generating arbitrage-free implied volatility (IV) surfaces consistent with historical data by combining model-free Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with continuous time stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven models. We focus on two classes of SDE models: regime switching models and Levy additive processes. By projecting historical surfaces onto the space of SDE model parameters, we obtain a distribution on the parameter subspace faithful to the data on which we then train a VAE. Arbitrage-free IV surfaces are then generated by sampling from the posterior distribution on the latent space, decoding to obtain SDE model parameters, and finally mapping those parameters to IV surfaces.
We propose a novel time discretization for the log-normal SABR model which is a popular stochastic volatility model that is widely used in financial practice. Our time discretization is a variant of the Euler-Maruyama scheme. We study its asymptotic properties in the limit of a large number of time steps under a certain asymptotic regime which includes the case of finite maturity, small vol-of-vol and large initial volatility with fixed product of vol-of-vol and initial volatility. We derive an almost sure limit and a large deviations result for the log-asset price in the limit of large number of time steps. We derive an exact representation of the implied volatility surface for arbitrary maturity and strike in this regime. Using this representation we obtain analytical expansions of the implied volatility for small maturity and extreme strikes, which reproduce at leading order known asymptotic results for the continuous time model.
We derive a backward and forward nonlinear PDEs that govern the implied volatility of a contingent claim whenever the latter is well-defined. This would include at least any contingent claim written on a positive stock price whose payoff at a possibly random time is convex. We also discuss suitable initial and boundary conditions for those PDEs. Finally, we demonstrate how to solve them numerically by using an iterative finite-difference approach.
We study the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing for a general financial market under Knightian Uncertainty. We adopt a functional analytic approach which require neither specific assumptions on the class of priors $mathcal{P}$ nor on the structure of the state space. Several aspects of modeling under Knightian Uncertainty are considered and analyzed. We show the need for a suitable adaptation of the notion of No Free Lunch with Vanishing Risk and discuss its relation to the choice of an appropriate filtration. In an abstract setup, we show that absence of arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of emph{approximate} martingale measures sharing the same polar set of $mathcal{P}$. We then specialize the results to a discrete-time framework in order to obtain true martingale measures.
We study the shapes of the implied volatility when the underlying distribution has an atom at zero and analyse the impact of a mass at zero on at-the-money implied volatility and the overall level of the smile. We further show that the behaviour at small strikes is uniquely determined by the mass of the atom up to high asymptotic order, under mild assumptions on the remaining distribution on the positive real line. We investigate the structural difference with the no-mass-at-zero case, showing how one can--theoretically--distinguish between mass at the origin and a heavy-left-tailed distribution. We numerically test our model-free results in stochastic models with absorption at the boundary, such as the CEV process, and in jump-to-default models. Note that while Lees moment formula tells that implied variance is at most asymptotically linear in log-strike, other celebrated results for exact smile asymptotics such as Benaim and Friz (09) or Gulisashvili (10) do not apply in this setting--essentially due to the breakdown of Put-Call duality.
Manifold-valued data naturally arises in medical imaging. In cognitive neuroscience, for instance, brain connectomes base the analysis of coactivation patterns between different brain regions on the analysis of the correlations of their functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) time series - an object thus constrained by construction to belong to the manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices. One of the challenges that naturally arises consists of finding a lower-dimensional subspace for representing such manifold-valued data. Traditional techniques, like principal component analysis, are ill-adapted to tackle non-Euclidean spaces and may fail to achieve a lower-dimensional representation of the data - thus potentially pointing to the absence of lower-dimensional representation of the data. However, these techniques are restricted in that: (i) they do not leverage the assumption that the connectomes belong on a pre-specified manifold, therefore discarding information; (ii) they can only fit a linear subspace to the data. In this paper, we are interested in variants to learn potentially highly curved submanifolds of manifold-valued data. Motivated by the brain connectomes example, we investigate a latent variable generative model, which has the added benefit of providing us with uncertainty estimates - a crucial quantity in the medical applications we are considering. While latent variable models have been proposed to learn linear and nonlinear spaces for Euclidean data, or geodesic subspaces for manifold data, no intrinsic latent variable model exists to learn nongeodesic subspaces for manifold data. This paper fills this gap and formulates a Riemannian variational autoencoder with an intrinsic generative model of manifold-valued data. We evaluate its performances on synthetic and real datasets by introducing the formalism of weighted Riemannian submanifolds.