Neural Options Pricing
Neural Options Pricing
This paper introduces a novel approach to option pricing by combining neural stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with classical martingale pricing theory. The key idea is to treat neural SDEs as universal approximators for Itô processes, allowing the underlying asset price dynamics to be learned directly from data without parametric assumptions. The authors propose training the neural SDE using the Wasserstein-1 distance as a loss function, which measures the discrepancy between the empirical distributions of the model and target processes. This method, a variation of SDE-GAN, avoids the need for adversarial training and provides a direct gradient-based optimization. A central conjecture is that the error in the computed option price is bounded by the Wasserstein-1 distance achieved during training, leveraging the Lipschitz property of option payoffs.
Experiments on synthetic data from geometric Brownian motion demonstrate that the neural SDE can accurately learn the underlying dynamics and produce European call option prices that closely match the Black-Scholes formula. The results also show a strong correlation between the training loss and option pricing error, providing empirical support for the conjectured bound. While the current implementation is limited to one dimension due to computational constraints of the Wasserstein distance, the framework offers a flexible, unsupervised alternative to traditional option pricing models. Future work includes extending to higher dimensions via dual formulations or GAN-based approaches, and proving the conjectured bound in full generality.
Highlights
- 1Proposes a novel framework for pricing options using neural SDEs, eliminating assumptions on the underlying price process form.
- 2Implements a Wasserstein-1 distance loss function for training neural SDEs, enabling direct distribution matching without adversarial training.
- 3Conjectures that the option pricing error is bounded by the Wasserstein-1 distance between the learned and true price distributions.
- 4Demonstrates the pipeline on synthetic geometric Brownian motion data, showing accurate option prices compared to Black-Scholes.
Methods
- MNeural SDEs: drift and diffusion functions parameterized by multi-layer perceptrons, trained to approximate the target price process.
- MWasserstein-1 distance: used as a loss function, computed via empirical CDF comparison for 1-dimensional distributions.
- MGirsanov theorem: applied to compute risk-neutral option prices from the learned neural SDE under the equivalent martingale measure.
- MGradient descent optimization: Adam optimizer used to minimize the Wasserstein loss over batches of simulated trajectories.
Results
- RNeural SDEs successfully approximate geometric Brownian motion, with empirical distributions closely matching target after training.
- RComputed neural option prices for European calls converge to Black-Scholes prices across multiple strike prices.
- RThe Wasserstein-1 loss during training correlates with the option pricing error, supporting the conjectured bound.
- RIn a controlled experiment with 1,000 random neural SDE pairs, most points satisfy the inequality |E_W[f(S_T)] - E_V[f(R_T)]| ≤ W_1(S_T, R_T).
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