We study a system of $n$ differential equations, each in dimension $d$. Only the first equation is forced by a Brownian motion and the dependence structure is such that, under a local weak Hörmander condition, the noise propagates to the whole system. We prove upper bounds for the transition density (heat kernel) and its derivatives of any order. Then we give precise short-time asymptotics of the density at a suitable central limit time scale. Both these results account for the different non-diffusive scales of propagation in the various components. Finally, we provide a valuation formula for short-maturity at-the-money Asian basket options under correlated local volatility dynamics.
A small time asymptotics of the density is established for a simplified (non-Gaussian, strictly hypoelliptic) second chaos process tangent to the Dudley relativistic diffusion.
We study a rough differential equation driven by fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $H$ $(1/4<H \le 1/2)$. Under Hörmander's condition on the coefficient vector fields, the solution has a smooth density for each fixed time. Using Watanabe's distributional Malliavin calculus, we obtain a short time full asymptotic expansion of the density under quite natural assumptions. Our main result can be regarded as a "fractional version" of Ben Arous' famous work on the off-diagonal asymptotics.
Among all generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes which sample the same invariant measure and for which the same amount of randomness (a $N$-dimensional Brownian motion) is injected in the system, we prove that the asymptotic rate of convergence is maximized by a non-reversible hypoelliptic one.
We consider a general class of non-gradient hypoelliptic Langevin diffusions and study two related questions. The first one is large deviations for hypoelliptic multiscale diffusions. The second one is small mass asymptotics of the invariant measure corresponding to hypoelliptic Langevin operators and of related hypoelliptic Poisson equations. The invariant measure corresponding to the hypoelliptic problem and appropriate hypoelliptic Poisson equations enter the large deviations rate function due to the multiscale effects. Based on the small mass asymptotics we derive that the large deviations…
In this paper we prove a short time asymptotic expansion of a hypoelliptic heat kernel on an Euclidean space and a compact manifold. We study the "cut locus" case, namely, the case where energy-minimizing paths which join the two points under consideration form not a finite set, but a compact manifold. Under mild assumptions we obtain an asymptotic expansion of the heat kernel up to any order. Our approach is probabilistic and the heat kernel is regarded as the density of the law of a hypoelliptic diffusion process, which is realized as a unique solution of the corresponding stochastic differe…
Multidimensional hypoelliptic diffusions arise naturally in different fields, for example to model neuronal activity. Estimation in those models is complex because of the degenerate structure of the diffusion coefficient. In this paper we consider hypoelliptic diffusions, given as a solution of two-dimensional stochastic differential equations (SDEs), with the discrete time observations of both coordinates being available on an interval $T = nΔ_n$, with $Δ_n$ the time step between the observations. The estimation is studied in the asymptotic setting, with $T\to\infty$ as $Δ_n\to 0$. We build a…
We consider the kernel of a hypoelliptic diffusion beyond the case of sub-ellipticity or polynomial coefficients. We get a full asymptotic expansion for small times, based on a Duhamel-type comparison with an approximate polynomial kernel. As in the sub-elliptic case, some change of scale based on the geometry of some Lie brackets yields a non-trivial limit for the kernel as time goes to zero. Remarkably, a different scale is needed to observe a non-trivial large deviation principle.
We study the small-time asymptotics for hypoelliptic diffusion processes conditioned by their initial and final positions, in a model class of diffusions satisfying a weak Hörmander condition where the diffusivity is constant and the drift is linear. We show that, while the diffusion bridge can exhibit a blow-up behaviour in the small time limit, we can still make sense of suitably rescaled fluctuations which converge weakly. We explicitly describe the limit fluctuation process in terms of quantities associated to the unconditioned diffusion. In the discussion of examples, we also find an expr…
Density expansions for hypoelliptic diffusions $(X^1,...,X^d)$ are revisited. In particular, we are interested in density expansions of the projection $(X_T^1,...,X_T^l)$, at time $T>0$, with $l \leq d$. Global conditions are found which replace the well-known "not-in-cutlocus" condition known from heat-kernel asymptotics. Our small noise expansion allows for a "second order" exponential factor. As application, new light is shed on the Takanobu--Watanabe expansion of Brownian motion and Levy's stochastic area. Further applications include tail and implied volatility asymptotics in some stochas…
The long-time/large-scale, small-friction asymptotic for the one dimensional Langevin equation with a periodic potential is studied in this paper. It is shown that the Freidlin-Wentzell and central limit theorem (homogenization) limits commute. We prove that, in the combined small friction, long-time/large-scale limit the particle position converges weakly to a Brownian motion with a singular diffusion coefficient which we compute explicitly. We show that the same result is valid for a whole one parameter family of space/time rescalings. The proofs of our main results are based on some novel e…
A diffusion process associated with the real sub-Laplacian $Δ_b$, the real part of the complex Kohn-Spencer Laplacian $\square_b$, on a strictly pseudoconvex CR manifold has been constructed. In this paper, we investigate diagonal short time asymptotics of the heat kernel corresponding to the diffusion process by using Watanabe's asymptotic expansion and give a representation for the asymptotic expansion of heat kernels which shows a relationship to the geometric structure.
This paper presents estimates for the distribution of the exit time from balls and short time asymptotics for measure metric Dirichlet spaces. The estimates cover the classical Gaussian case, the sub-diffusive case which can be observed on particular fractals and further less regular cases as well. The proof is based on a new chaining argument and it is free of volume growth assumptions.
In this paper we study short time asymptotics of a density function of the solution of a stochastic differential equation driven by fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $H \in (1/2, 1)$ when the coefficient vector fields satisfy an ellipticity condition at the starting point. We prove both on-diagonal and off-diagonal asymptotics under mild additional assumptions. Our main tool is Malliavin calculus, in particular, Watanabe's theory of generalized Wiener functionals.
We write $R_n$ for the minimal position attained after time $n$ by a branching random walk in the boundary case. In this article, we prove that $R_n - \frac{1}{2} \log n$ converges in law toward a shifted Gumbel distribution.
We study the short-time asymptotical behavior of stochastic flows on \mathbb{R} in the \sup-norm. The results are stated in terms of a Gaussian process associated with the covariation of the flow. In case the Gaussian process has a continuous version the two processes can be coupled in such a way that the difference is uniformly $o(\ln\ln t^{-1})$. In case it has no continuous version, an $O(\ln\ln t^{-1})$ estimate is obtained under mild regularity assumptions. The main tools are Gaussian measure concentration and a martingale version of the Slepian comparison principle.
Motivated by marginals-mimicking results for Itô processes via SDEs and by their applications to volatility modeling in finance, we discuss the weak convergence of the law of a hypoelliptic diffusions conditioned to belong to a target affine subspace at final time, namely $\mathcal{L}(Z_t|Y_t = y)$ if $X_{\cdot}=(Y_\cdot,Z_{\cdot})$. To do so, we revisit Varadhan-type estimates in a small-noise regime (as opposed to small-time), studying the density of the lower-dimensional component $Y$. The application to stochastic volatility models include the small-time and, for certain models, the large-…
We show that the rate of convergence of asymptotic expansions for solutions of SDEs is generally higher in the case of degenerate (or partial) diffusion compared to the elliptic case, i.e. it is higher when the Brownian motion directly acts only on some components of the diffusion. In the scalar case, this phenomenon was already observed in (Gobet and Miri 2014) using Malliavin calculus techniques. In this paper, we provide a general and detailed analysis by employing the recent study of intrinsic functional spaces related to hypoelliptic Kolmogorov operators in (Pagliarani et al. 2016). Relev…
We are concerned with an $M/M$-type join the shortest queue ($M/M$-JSQ for short) with $k$ parallel queues for an arbitrary positive integer $k$, where the servers may be heterogeneous. We are interested in the tail asymptotic of the stationary distribution of this queueing model, provided the system is stable. We prove that this asymptotic for the minimum queue length is exactly geometric, and its decay rate is the $k$-th power of the traffic intensity of the corresponding $k$ server queues with a single waiting line. For this, we use two formulations, a quasi-birth-and-death (QBD for short) …
We study a stochastic differential equation in the sense of rough path theory driven by fractional Brownian rough path with Hurst parameter H (1/3 < H <= 1/2) under the ellipticity assumption at the starting point. In such a case, the law of the solution at a fixed time has a kernel, i.e., a density function with respect to Lebesgue measure. In this paper we prove a short time off-diagonal asymptotic expansion of the kernel under mild additional assumptions. Our main tool is Watanabe's distributional Malliavin calculus.
Let $X_1, X_2,\dots$ be a short-memory linear process of random variables. For $1\leq q<2$, let $\cF$ be a bounded set of real-valued functions on $[0,1]$ with finite $q$-variation. It is proved that $\{n^{-1/2}\sum_{i=1}^nX_if(i/n)\colon\,f\in\cF\}$ converges in outer distribution in the Banach space of bounded functions on $\cF$ as $n\to\infty$. Several applications to a regression model and a multiple change point model are given.
For incomplete sub-Riemannian manifolds, and for an associated second-order hypoelliptic operator, which need not be symmetric, we identify two alternative conditions for the validity of Gaussian-type upper bounds on heat kernels and transition probabilities, with optimal constant in the exponent. Under similar conditions, we obtain the small-time logarithmic asymptotics of the heat kernel, and show concentration of diffusion bridge measures near a path of minimal energy. The first condition requires that we consider points whose distance apart is no greater than the sum of their distances to …
We consider the limiting behavior of fluctuations of small noise diffusions with multiple scales around their homogenized deterministic limit. We allow full dependence of the coefficients on the slow and fast motion. These processes arise naturally when one is interested in short time asymptotics of multiple scale diffusions. We do not make periodicity assumptions, but we impose conditions on the fast motion to guarantee ergodicity. Depending on the order of interaction between the fast scale and the size of the noise we get different behavior. In certain cases additional drift terms arise in …
We consider queueing systems with n parallel queues under a Join the Shortest Queue (JSQ) policy in the Halfin-Whitt heavy traffic regime. We use the martingale method to prove that a scaled process counting the number of idle servers and queues of length exactly 2 weakly converges to a two-dimensional reflected Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, while processes counting longer queues converge to a deterministic system decaying to zero in constant time. This limiting system is comparable to that of the traditional Halfin-Whitt model, but there are key differences in the queueing behavior of the JSQ m…
We study the load balancing system operating under Join the Shortest Queue (JSQ) in the many-server heavy-traffic regime. If $N$ is the number of servers, we let the difference between the total service rate and the total arrival rate be $N^{1-α}$ with $α>0$. We show that for $α>4$ the average queue length behaves similarly to the classical heavy-traffic regime. Specifically, we prove that the distribution of the average queue length multiplied by $N^{1-α}$ converges to an exponential random variable. Moreover, we show a result analogous to state space collapse. We provide two proofs for our r…
We study the short-time asymptotics of conditional expectations of smooth and non-smooth functions of a (discontinuous) Ito semimartingale; we compute the leading term in the asymptotics in terms of the local characteristics of the semimartingale. We derive in particular the asymptotic behavior of call options with short maturity in a semimartingale model: whereas the behavior of \textit{out-of-the-money} options is found to be linear in time, the short time asymptotics of \textit{at-the-money} options is shown to depend on the fine structure of the semimartingale.
A description of the short time behavior of solutions of the Allen-Cahn equation with a smoothened additive noise is presented. The key result is that in the sharp interface limit solutions move according to motion by mean curvature with an additional stochastic forcing. This extends a similar result of Funaki in spatial dimension $n=2$ to arbitrary dimensions.
A small-time Edgeworth expansion of the density of an asset price is given under a general stochastic volatility model, from which asymptotic expansions of put option prices and at-the-money implied volatilities follow. A limit theorem for at-the-money implied volatility skew and curvature is also given as a corollary. The rough Bergomi model is treated as an example.
We consider a model for interest rates, where the short rate is given by a time-homogenous, one-dimensional affine process in the sense of Duffie, Filipovic and Schachermayer. We show that in such a model yield curves can only be normal, inverse or humped (i.e. endowed with a single local maximum). Each case can be characterized by simple conditions on the present short rate. We give conditions under which the short rate process will converge to a limit distribution and describe the limit distribution in terms of its cumulant generating function. We apply our results to the Vasicek model, the …
The two-time distribution gives the limiting joint distribution of the heights at two different times of a local 1D random growth model in the curved geometry. This distribution has been computed in a specific model but is expected to be universal in the KPZ universality class. Its marginals are the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution. In this paper we study two limits of the two-time distribution. The first, is the limit of long time separation when the quotient of the two times goes to infinity, and the second, is the short time limit when the quotient goes to zero.
