1344 J. Sirignano, K. Spiliopoulos / Journal of Computational Physics 375 (2018) 1339–1364
˜
G
1
(θ
n
, s
n
) :=
˜
G
1,a
(θ
n
, s
n
) +
˜
G
1,b
(θ
n
, s
n
) (3.2)
˜
G
1,a
(θ
n
, s
n
) :=
∂
f
∂t
(t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) +L
1
f (t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) +
1
2
d
i=1
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
+σ (x
n
)W
;θ) −
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
;θ)
σ
i
(x
n
)W
i
×∇
θ
∂
f
∂t
(t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) +L
1
f (t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) +
1
2
d
i=1
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
+σ (x
n
)
˜
W
;θ) −
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
;θ)
σ
i
(x
n
)
˜
W
i
,
˜
G
1,b
(θ
n
, s
n
) :=
∂
f
∂t
(t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) +L
1
f (t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) −
1
2
d
i=1
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
−σ (x
n
)W
;θ) −
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
;θ)
σ
i
(x
n
)W
i
×∇
θ
∂
f
∂t
(t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) +L
1
f (t
n
, x
n
;θ
n
) −
1
2
d
i=1
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
−σ (x
n
)
˜
W
;θ) −
∂ f
∂x
i
(t, x
n
;θ)
σ
i
(x
n
)
˜
W
i
.
The approximation (3.2) has O() bias as an approximation for ∇
θ
G
1
(θ
n
, s
n
). Eq. (3.2)uses antithetic variates in the sense
that
˜
G
1,a
(θ
n
, s
n
) uses the random variables (W
,
˜
W
) while
˜
G
1,b
(θ
n
, s
n
) uses (−W
, −
˜
W
). See [1]for a background on
antithetic variates in simulation algorithms. A Taylor expansion can be used to show the approximation error is O(). It is
important to highlight that there is no computational cost associated with the magnitude of ; an arbitrarily small can
be chosen with no additional computational cost (although there may be numerical underflow or overflow problems). The
modified algorithm using the Monte Carlo approximation for the second derivatives is:
1. Generate
random points (t
n
, x
n
) from [0, T ] × and (τ
n
, z
n
) from [0, T ] ×∂ according to respective densities ν
1
and
ν
2
. Also, draw the random point w
n
from with density ν
3
.
2. Calculate
the step
˜
G(θ
n
, s
n
) =
˜
G
1
(θ
n
, s
n
) +∇
θ
G
2
(θ
n
, s
n
) +∇
θ
G
3
(θ
n
, s
n
) at the randomly sampled points s
n
={(t
n
, x
n
),
(
τ
n
, z
n
), w
n
}.
˜
G(θ
n
, s
n
) is an approximation for ∇
θ
G(θ
n
, s
n
).
3. Take
a step at the random point s
n
:
θ
n+1
=θ
n
−α
n
˜
G(θ
n
, s
n
)
4. Repeat until convergence criterion is satisfied.
In
conclusion, the modified algorithm here is computationally less expensive than the original algorithm in Section 2 but
introduces some bias and variance. The variance essentially increases the i.i.d. noise in the stochastic gradient descent step;
this noise averages out over a large number of samples though. The original algorithm in Section 2 is unbiased and has lower
variance, but is computationally more expensive. We numerically implement the algorithm for a class of free boundary PDEs
in Section 4. Future research may investigate other methods to further improve the computational evaluation of the second
derivative terms (for instance, multi-level Monte Carlo).
4. Numerical analysis for a high-dimensional free boundary PDE
We test our algorithm on a class of high-dimensional free boundary PDEs. These free boundary PDEs are used in finance
to price American options and are often referred to as “American option PDEs”. An American option is a financial derivative
on a portfolio of stocks. The option owner may at any time t ∈[0, T ] choose to exercise the American option and receive
a payoff which is determined by the underlying prices of the stocks in the portfolio. T is called the maturity date of the
option and the payoff function is g(x) : R
d
→R. Let X
t
∈R
d
be the prices of d stocks. If at time t the stock prices X
t
= x, the
price of the option is u(t, x). The price function u(t, x) satisfies a free boundary PDE on [0, T ] × R
d
. For American options,
one is primarily interested in the solution u(0, X
0
) since this is the fair price to buy or sell the option.
Besides
the high dimensions and the free boundary, the American option PDE is challenging to numerically solve since
the payoff function g(x) (which both appears in the initial condition and determines the free boundary) is not continuously
differentiable.
Section 4.
1 states the free boundary PDE and the deep learning algorithm to solve it. To address the free boundary,
we supplement the algorithm presented in Section 2 with an iterative method; see Section 4.1. Section 4.2 describes the
architecture and implementation details for the neural network. Section 4.3 reports numerical accuracy for a case where a
semi-analytic solution exists. Section 4.4 reports numerical accuracy for a case where no semi-analytic solution exists.
4.1. The free boundary PDE
We now specify the free boundary PDE for u(t, x). The stock price dynamics and option price are:
dX
i
t
=μ(X
i
t
)dt + σ (X
i
t
)dW
i
t
,
u(t, x) = sup
τ ≥t
E[e
−r(τ ∧T )
g( X
τ ∧T
)|X
t
= x],