Importance sampling for option pricing with feedforward neural networks

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Importance sampling for option pricing with feedforward neural networks

Aleksandar Arandjelović
Thorsten Rheinländer
Pavel V. Shevchenko
Published on 12/28/2021
Options
Derivatives
Machine learning
Deep learning
Risk management

This paper introduces a novel importance sampling technique for option pricing that leverages feedforward neural networks to approximate the optimal change of measure. The key idea is to train a neural network to map the underlying asset prices to a control variate that minimizes the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator. The authors provide theoretical analysis showing that the neural network can approximate the optimal importance sampling density arbitrarily well given sufficient capacity. The method is applied to price various options including European, Asian, and barrier options under different asset dynamics. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the neural network-based approach achieves substantial variance reduction, often by several orders of magnitude, compared to standard Monte Carlo and traditional importance sampling methods. The computational cost of training the network is offset by the significant reduction in the number of simulation paths required for accurate pricing. The method is particularly effective in high-dimensional settings where traditional importance sampling techniques struggle. Overall, the paper presents a practical and efficient framework for variance reduction in option pricing that can be easily integrated into existing Monte Carlo simulation pipelines.

Highlights

  • 1Proposes a novel importance sampling method for option pricing using feedforward neural networks to approximate the optimal change of measure.
  • 2Demonstrates significant variance reduction compared to standard Monte Carlo methods in various option pricing scenarios.
  • 3Provides theoretical justification for the neural network-based importance sampling approach.
  • 4Shows that the method is computationally efficient and can be applied to high-dimensional problems.

Methods

  • M
    Feedforward neural networks to learn the optimal importance sampling density.
  • M
    Monte Carlo simulation with importance sampling for option pricing.
  • M
    Stochastic gradient descent for training the neural network.
  • M
    Cross-entropy method for initializing the neural network parameters.

Results

  • R
    Neural network importance sampling reduces variance by orders of magnitude compared to naive Monte Carlo.
  • R
    The method achieves accurate option prices with fewer simulation paths.
  • R
    Outperforms traditional importance sampling techniques in high-dimensional settings.
  • R
    Robust to different option types including European, Asian, and barrier options.
  • R
    Computational overhead is manageable and scales well with dimension.
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