Tractability of multivariate analytic problems

In the theory of tractability of multivariate problems one usually studies problems with finite smoothness. Then we want to know which $s$-variate problems can be approximated to within $\varepsilon$ by using, say, polynomially many in $s$ and $\varepsilon^{-1}$ function values or arbitrary linear functionals. There is a recent stream of work for multivariate analytic problems for which we want to answer the usual tractability questions with $\varepsilon^{-1}$ replaced by $1+\log \varepsilon^{-1}$. In this vein of research, multivariate integration and approximation have been studied over Korobov spaces with exponentially fast decaying Fourier coefficients. This is work of J. Dick, G. Larcher, and the authors. There is a natural need to analyze more general analytic problems defined over more general spaces and obtain tractability results in terms of $s$ and $1+\log \varepsilon^{-1}$. The goal of this paper is to survey the existing results, present some new results, and propose further questions for the study of tractability of multivariate analytic questions

Smoothing the payoff for efficient computation of Basket option prices

We consider the problem of pricing basket options in a multivariate Black Scholes or Variance Gamma model. From a numerical point of view, pricing such options corresponds to moderate and high dimensional numerical integration problems with non-smooth integrands. Due to this lack of regularity, higher order numerical integration techniques may not be directly available, requiring the use of methods like Monte Carlo specifically designed to work for non-regular problems. We propose to use the inherent smoothing property of the density of the underlying in the above models to mollify the payoff function by means of an exact conditional expectation. The resulting conditional expectation is unbiased and yields a smooth integrand, which is amenable to the efficient use of adaptive sparse grid cubature. Numerical examples indicate that the high-order method may perform orders of magnitude faster compared to Monte Carlo or Quasi Monte Carlo in dimensions up to 35

Estimation with Numerical Integration on Sparse Grids

For the estimation of many econometric models, integrals without analytical solutions have to be evaluated. Examples include limited dependent variables and nonlinear panel data models. In the case of one-dimensional integrals, Gaussian quadrature is known to work efficiently for a large class of problems. In higher dimensions, similar approaches discussed in the literature are either very specific and hard to implement or suffer from exponentially rising computational costs in the number of dimensions - a problem known as the "curse of dimensionality" of numerical integration. We propose a strategy that shares the advantages of Gaussian quadrature methods, is very general and easily implemented, and does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Monte Carlo experiments for the random parameters logit model indicate the superior performance of the proposed method over simulation techniques

Rank-1 lattice rules for multivariate integration in spaces of permutation-invariant functions: Error bounds and tractability

We study multivariate integration of functions that are invariant under permutations (of subsets) of their arguments. We find an upper bound for the $n$th minimal worst case error and show that under certain conditions, it can be bounded independent of the number of dimensions. In particular, we study the application of unshifted and randomly shifted rank-$1$ lattice rules in such a problem setting. We derive conditions under which multivariate integration is polynomially or strongly polynomially tractable with the Monte Carlo rate of convergence $O(n^{-1/2})$. Furthermore, we prove that those tractability results can be achieved with shifted lattice rules and that the shifts are indeed necessary. Finally, we show the existence of rank-$1$ lattice rules whose worst case error on the permutation- and shift-invariant spaces converge with (almost) optimal rate. That is, we derive error bounds of the form $O(n^{-\lambda/2})$ for all $1 \leq \lambda < 2 \alpha$, where $\alpha$ denotes the smoothness of the spaces. Keywords: Numerical integration, Quadrature, Cubature, Quasi-Monte Carlo methods, Rank-1 lattice rules.Comment: 26 pages; minor changes due to reviewer's comments; the final publication is available at link.springer.co