Well-posedness and numerical schemes for one-dimensional McKean-Vlasov equations and interacting particle systems with discontinuous drift

In this paper, we first establish well-posedness results for one-dimensional McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and related particle systems with a measure-dependent drift coefficient that is discontinuous in the spatial component, and a diffusion coefficient which is a Lipschitz function of the state only. We only require a fairly mild condition on the diffusion coefficient, namely to be non-zero in a point of discontinuity of the drift, while we need to impose certain structural assumptions on the measure-dependence of the drift. Second, we study fully implementable Euler-Maruyama type schemes for the particle system to approximate the solution of the one-dimensional McKean-Vlasov SDE. Here, we will prove strong convergence results in terms of the number of time-steps and number of particles. Due to the discontinuity of the drift, the convergence analysis is non-standard and the usual strong convergence order $1/2$ known for the Lipschitz case cannot be recovered for all schemes.Comment: 33 pages, 4 figures, revised introduction and Section

An Offline Learning Approach to Propagator Models

We consider an offline learning problem for an agent who first estimates an unknown price impact kernel from a static dataset, and then designs strategies to liquidate a risky asset while creating transient price impact. We propose a novel approach for a nonparametric estimation of the propagator from a dataset containing correlated price trajectories, trading signals and metaorders. We quantify the accuracy of the estimated propagator using a metric which depends explicitly on the dataset. We show that a trader who tries to minimise her execution costs by using a greedy strategy purely based on the estimated propagator will encounter suboptimality due to so-called spurious correlation between the trading strategy and the estimator and due to intrinsic uncertainty resulting from a biased cost functional. By adopting an offline reinforcement learning approach, we introduce a pessimistic loss functional taking the uncertainty of the estimated propagator into account, with an optimiser which eliminates the spurious correlation, and derive an asymptotically optimal bound on the execution costs even without precise information on the true propagator. Numerical experiments are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed propagator estimator and the pessimistic trading strategy.Comment: 12 figure

A fast iterative PDE-based algorithm for feedback controls of nonsmooth mean-field control problems

A PDE-based accelerated gradient algorithm is proposed to seek optimal feedback controls of McKean-Vlasov dynamics subject to nonsmooth costs, whose coefficients involve mean-field interactions both on the state and action. It exploits a forward-backward splitting approach and iteratively refines the approximate controls based on the gradients of smooth costs, the proximal maps of nonsmooth costs, and dynamically updated momentum parameters. At each step, the state dynamics is realized via a particle approximation, and the required gradient is evaluated through a coupled system of nonlocal linear PDEs. The latter is solved by finite difference approximation or neural network-based residual approximation, depending on the state dimension. Exhaustive numerical experiments for low and high-dimensional mean-field control problems, including sparse stabilization of stochastic Cucker-Smale models, are presented, which reveal that our algorithm captures important structures of the optimal feedback control, and achieves a robust performance with respect to parameter perturbation.Comment: Add Sections 2.3 and 2.4 for theoretical convergence result

Well-posedness and tamed schemes for McKean-Vlasov Equations with Common Noise

In this paper, we first establish well-posedness of McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (McKean-Vlasov SDEs) with common noise, possibly with coefficients having super-linear growth in the state variable. Second, we present stable time-stepping schemes for this class of McKean-Vlasov SDEs. Specifically, we propose an explicit tamed Euler and tamed Milstein scheme for an interacting particle system associated with the McKean-Vlasov equation. We prove stability and strong convergence of order $1/2$ and $1$, respectively. To obtain our main results, we employ techniques from calculus on the Wasserstein space. The proof for the strong convergence of the tamed Milstein scheme only requires the coefficients to be once continuously differentiable in the state and measure component. To demonstrate our theoretical findings, we present several numerical examples, including mean-field versions of the stochastic $3/2$ volatility model and the stochastic double well dynamics with multiplicative noise.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figure