1. Introduction
Nowadays, various models and methodologies are available to calculate theoretical values of options, including the famous Black–Scholes model as well as stochastic volatility models such as the Heston or the Stein and Stein models. These models assume that the price of the underlying asset is represented by a continuous function, which is not always consistent with real market prices. This paper focuses on jump–diffusion models originally suggested by Merton [
1] and later generalized (e.g., in [
2]). These models assume that the spot price
S of the underlying asset at time
follows the jump–diffusion process
where
denotes the left-hand limit of
S at
,
is the drift rate,
is standard Brownian motion and
is the volatility associated with the Brownian component of the process.
is a Poisson process with intensity
that is independent of
, and
is a sequence of independent identically distributed nonnegative random variables such that
has a distribution with the probability density function
g. There are several possible choices for the function
g. In the Merton model
is normally distributed with the mean
and the standard deviation
and
For other models and more details, see [
1,
2,
3]. Let the variable
represent time to maturity and
r be a risk-free rate. Using no arbitrage principle and the standard Itô calculus, one can derive that the market price
of the option at time to maturity
t is the solution of the equation [
1,
2,
3,
4]:
where the operators
and
are given by
and
The parameter represents the expected value . The initial and boundary conditions depend on the type of the option.
In
Section 3, Equation (
3) is transformed to logarithmic prices and restricted to a bounded domain. Then, the Galerkin method combined with the Crank–Nicolson scheme is used for its numerical solution. The stability of the scheme and convergence of the method have already been investigated (see [
4,
5,
6] and references therein). This paper focuses on the structure of the discretization matrices. It is known that matrices arising from wavelet discretization of differential operators have a so-called finger pattern (see
Figure 1, left). In [
7,
8,
9,
10], cubic and quartic wavelet bases were constructed such that the bi-infinite stiffness and mass matrices have a finite number of nonzero entries in each column and have a similar structure, as shown in
Figure 1 (left). This simplifies the algorithm and increases the efficiency of wavelet-based methods. However, a construction of quadratic spline wavelets with this property has not yet been proposed, and such a construction is the main aim of this paper. It should also be mentioned that the wavelet bases from [
11,
12,
13], which are semiorthogonal with respect to the
-seminorm, lead to banded matrices for the one-dimensional Poisson equation, and the
-orthogonal wavelets from [
14,
15] lead to diagonal mass matrices.
The differential operator
is a special case of an operator
defined by
for
. Let
and
be positive definite on
.
covers the Poisson equation, the Helmholtz equation, the stationary convection diffusion equation and various equations from financial mathematics, such as equations representing the Black–Scholes model and the Heston model semidiscretized in time using the
-scheme.
For
, denote
,
,
,
,
and
where
represents the set of all polynomials on
of degree at most
m. The main aim of this paper is to construct a quadratic spline wavelet basis
on the interval
satisfying homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions such that the matrix
where
is the
-inner product, has
nonzero entries in each column if
,
, and
for some
.
Wavelet bases on product domains can be constructed using an isotropic or anisotropic tensor product approach (see, e.g., [
16,
17]). The discretization matrices for such multidimensional wavelet bases also have
of nonzero entries in each row if
Although the property that the matrix has nonzero entries in each column is valid for any , in most applications l should be small.
Since the differential operator
is a special case of the operator
, the discretization matrix for this operator is sparse. This paper also aims to derive decay estimates for the entries of matrix arising from discretization of the integral term using the Galerkin method with the proposed wavelet basis and to show that truncated discretization matrices for the problem in Equation (
3) are sparse. The sparsity of the discretization matrix has two advantages. First, the multiplication of this matrix with a vector requires
floating-point operations, while other quadratic spline wavelet bases require
operations and other bases such as quadratic B-spline basis require
operations because the matrix is typically full. This increases the efficiency of iterative methods for the numerical solution of the resulting discrete system. Second, due to the smaller number of elements, the computation of the discretization matrix is faster for the Galerkin method with the proposed basis than for the Galerkin method with other bases of the same order, e.g., other quadratic spline wavelet bases and quadratic B-spline bases.
In addition to the orthogonality property, it is required that wavelets have vanishing moments and that the wavelet basis is well conditioned. Vanishing wavelet moments determine the decay of entries of discretization matrices. Since the constructed wavelets have three vanishing moments, this decay is fast (see Theorem 5 in
Section 3). Furthermore, due to vanishing moments, the basis can be used in adaptive wavelet methods (see [
17]). It is important that the basis is well-conditioned because the condition numbers of discretization matrices depend on condition numbers of the basis and small condition numbers of system matrices guarantee the stability of computation and influences the number of iterations of iterative methods used for the numerical solution of the resulting system.
Due to these interesting properties, the wavelet basis proposed in this paper can be used in many applications such as the numerical solution of various types of operator equations using the wavelet-Galerkin method, an adaptive wavelet method or a collocation method. For a survey of such applications, refer to [
4,
17,
18].
The paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, a construction of a wavelet basis satisfying the aforementioned properties is proposed and a rigorous proof of its Riesz basis property is provided. It is shown that the condition numbers of the basis are small with respect to both the
-norm and the
-seminorm. In
Section 3, the problem in Equation (
3) is discretized and the properties of discretization matrices studied. Finally, in
Section 4, numerical experiments are provided for pricing European options under the Merton model, and it is shown that the proposed method is efficient because it can achieve high-order convergence with respect to both time and spatial variables, the number of iterations is small, and due to sparsity of system matrices one iteration only requires a small number of floating-point operations. Furthermore, in comparison with methods from [
19,
20,
21], the proposed method requires a smaller number of degrees of freedom to obtain a sufficiently accurate solution.
2. Construction of Wavelets
First, briefly recall the concept of a wavelet basis. Let
be at most a countable index set such that each index
takes the form
and denote
. The norm of
,
, is defined by
The space of all sequences
with finite norm is denoted by
The symbol denotes the space of square-integrable functions defined on . Let be a real Hilbert space equipped with the inner product and the norm , e.g., H is the Sobolev space of functions that vanish at boundary points and whose first weak derivatives are in . The aim is to construct a wavelet basis for H in the sense of the following definition.
Definition 1. A family is called a wavelet basis of H if:
- (i)
Ψ
is a Riesz basis for H, i.e., the span of Ψ
is dense in H and there exist constants such thatfor all .- (ii)
The functions are local in the sense thatwhere the constant C does not depend on λ, and at a given level j the supports of only finitely many wavelets overlap at any point x. - (iii)
The family Ψ
has the hierarchical structurefor some . - (iv)
There exists such that all functions , , have L vanishing moments, i.e.,
For the two countable sets of functions
, the symbol
denotes the matrix
The constants
are called a lower and upper Riesz bound, respectively, and the number
is called the
condition number of
. In some papers, the squares of norms are used in Equation (
14) and the Riesz bounds are defined as
and
. The Gram matrix
can be finite or biinfinite and it is known that it represents a linear operator that is continuous, positive definite, and self-adjoint, and that the constants
and
satisfy
If
satisfies Equation (
14) but the span of
is not necessarily dense in
H, then
is called a
Riesz sequence in
H.
The definition of a wavelet basis is not unified in the mathematical literature, and Conditions (i)–(iv) from Definition 1 can be generalized. The functions from the set
are called
scaling functions and the functions from the set
,
are called
wavelets on the level
j. Wavelets in the inner part of the interval are typically translations and dilations of one function
or several functions
also called
wavelets, i.e.,
for some
and some
, and similarly the wavelets near the boundary are derived from functions called
boundary wavelets.
In the following, a construction of a new wavelet basis is proposed. Scaling functions are defined as in [
22,
23,
24]. Let
and
be quadratic B-splines on knots
and
, respectively. Then,
and
have the explicit form
The graphs of the functions
and
are displayed in
Figure 2.
For
, the functions
where
, form the scaling basis
and the spaces
form a multiresolution analysis.
For simplicity, denote
and
. To obtain sparse discretization matrices, dual spaces
and complement spaces
are defined by
where
is the
-orthogonal complement of
.
Lemma 1. The functions and , , , satisfyfor , , and , . Furthermore, the functions and , , , satisfy . Proof. Assume that , , and . Then, , and thus . Since and is orthogonal to , is obtained. Using the similar argument and the relations and , the remaining part of the lemma is proved. ☐
Therefore, if wavelets are defined as basis functions for the spaces
, then the matrices in Equation (
10) will be sparse.
Figure 1 shows the cases
,
and
,
. The inner wavelet generators are defined by
for
and the boundary wavelet generator is defined by
The coefficients
are computed such that
is
-orthogonal to
,
, where
for
. This leads to systems of linear algebraic equations with infinitely many solutions. Using numerical experiments, the coefficients
that lead to a well-conditioned wavelet basis were found, namely
and
,
, for
, and for the boundary wavelet
The graphs of constructed wavelets are displayed in
Figure 2.
The functions and are symmetric; the functions and are antisymmetric; for ; for and all the wavelets have three vanishing moments.
For
, a wavelet basis on the level
j
contains the functions
for
.
For
and
, the sets
are a wavelet basis in the space
and its finite-dimensional subset, respectively. In the following, the proof of the Riesz basis property of
is provided.
Theorem 1. The wavelets have three vanishing moments, and , , are Riesz bases of the spaces such that their lower Riesz bounds and the upper Riesz bounds are uniformly bounded, i.e., they satisfy for some constants c and C independent on j.
Proof. It was already mentioned that , , have three vanishing moments. Indeed, since are defined to be -orthogonal to , , and the polynomials , , restricted to support of are linear combinations of , relation is obtained, and thus have three vanishing moments. Therefore, the wavelets have three vanishing moments as well.
The
-orthogonality of
and
,
, implies the
-orthogonality of
to the functions
,
which form the basis of
and thus
Since the number of elements in
is equal to the dimension of
, the set
is a basis of
. Every finite dimensional basis is a Riesz basis and thus it remains to be proven that Riesz bounds for
are uniformly bounded. Let
and
. The matrix
has similar structure as the matrix
in Equation (42), and since its entries are
-products of piecewise polynomial functions, one is able to compute them precisely or with arbitrary precision. For
, the Gerschgorin circle theorem from [
25] yields
☐
The proof of the Riesz basis property in Equation (
14) for
is based on the following theorem [
8,
10,
26].
Theorem 2. Let and, for , let and be subspaces of the space , such that , , . Let be bases of , be bases of , and be bases of , such that Riesz bounds with respect to the -norm of , and are uniformly bounded, and let Ψ
be composed of and , , as in Equation (31). Furthermore, assume thatis invertible and that the spectral norm of is bounded independently on j. In addition, for some positive constants C, γ and d, such that , letandand similarly let Equations (35) and (36) hold for and on the dual side. Then,is a Riesz sequence in for . The following theorem shows that the spaces and defined above satisfy the assumptions of Theorem 2.
Theorem 3. There exist uniform Riesz bases of such that matrices defined by Equation (34) are invertible and the spectral norms of are bounded independently on j. Proof. Let
be defined by Equation (
24). For
let
such that
Since
for
, the relations in Equation (
38) lead to the system of four linear algebraic equations with four unknown coefficients for each function
. The invertibility of all four system matrices was verified using symbolic computations. Thus, the functions
exist and are unique. Then,
where
is a basis of
and the matrix
defined by Equation (
34) is tridiagonal and has the structure
Using symbolic computation and rounding the resulting elements of the matrix
to three decimal digits,
Similarly, the matrices
and
are given by
and
Thus, the matrices
and
are diagonally dominant and invertible. Due to the Johnson’s lower bound for the smallest singular value [
27],
where
. Therefore, the spectral norm of the inverse matrix satisfies
It remains to be proven that
are uniform Riesz bases of
. The matrices
are block diagonal matrices with
boundary blocks
and
and inner blocks
that do not depend on
j.
The Riesz lower bound
and the Riesz upper bound
satisfy
☐
Theorem 4. The set Ψ
satisfies Equation (14) for , ; especially, Ψ
is a Riesz basis of the space and Ψ
normalized in the -norm or in the -seminorm is a Riesz basis of the space . Proof. Using the Gershgorin circle theorem similarly to in the proof of Theorem 1, estimates
and
for the Riesz lower and upper bounds of
, respectively, are obtained. The estimates in Equations (
35) and (
36) are satisfied for
,
,
, and
. These parameters depend on the polynomial exactness and smoothness of the primal and dual spaces (see [
26]). Due to these facts, as well as Theorems 2 and 3, the proof is complete. ☐
Table 1 presents the minimal and maximal eigenvalues and the condition numbers (cond) of diagonally preconditioned stiffness and mass matrices, i.e.,
and
where
.
These values correspond to the lower and upper Riesz bounds and the condition numbers of normalized wavelet bases with respect to the
-norm and to the
-seminorm
. Although the aim is to construct a quadratic spline wavelet basis that leads to sparse discretization matrices rather than the optimization of the condition number, the resulting basis is better conditioned than many other quadratic spline wavelet bases (see comparison of quadratic spline wavelet bases in [
16]).
A wavelet basis on a bounded interval
can be constructed from the proposed wavelet basis on the unit interval using the simple linear transform
,
. Wavelet bases on the hypercube that are constructed using an isotropic, anisotropic, or sparse tensor product approach (see, e.g., [
4,
16,
17]) preserve the properties of the wavelet basis on the interval such as the Riesz basis property, vanishing moments, and the sparse structure of the discretization matrices.
3. Discretization of the Jump–Diffusion Option Pricing Models
In this section, the Galerkin method with the constructed wavelet basis is used for valuation of options under jump–diffusion models. The choice of the method is motivated by the fact that the Galerkin method using a wavelet basis, also called the wavelet-Galerkin method, has several advantages for equations containing an integral term. As mentioned above, the discretization matrices for the wavelet-Galerkin method are sparse or quasi-sparse, while most of the standard methods suffer from the fact that the discretization matrices are full. Furthermore, the wavelet-Galerkin method is higher-order accurate if higher-order bases are used and the solution is sufficiently smooth. For many types of equations, the discretization matrices are well-conditioned, which results in a small number of iterations when using iterative methods for solving the resulting discrete system. For details on the methods for the numerical solution of integral equations and operator equations containing the integral term, see [
4,
18].
Recall that the jump–diffusion models are represented by the partial integro-differential Equation (
3). The initial and boundary conditions depend on the type of the option. Here, the method is presented for a European put option. The value of a European call option can be computed using the put–call parity [
3]. The initial condition for a vanilla European put option is
where
K is the strike price, and the boundary conditions have the form
,
for
The minimal value
and the maximal value
are chosen such that a domain
approximates the unbounded domain
. Since
for small
S, the boundary conditions at
have the form
It is convenient to transform Equation (
3) to logarithmic prices
because the transformed differential operator
has constant coefficients.
The transformed equation is given by
where
,
,
,
, and
The error caused by localization, i.e., by solving the Equation (
54) on a bounded domain
X instead on the whole real line, was studied in [
4,
28]. Due to decays of a value of a put option and of a probability density function at infinity,
Furthermore, since
for
S close to zero, the integral term
can be approximated by
where
The boundary condition at the point
is a non-homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. Therefore, one can transform Equation (
54) into an equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Let
, where
is the solution of Equation (
54) satisfying the initial and boundary conditions defined above and
W is a function satisfying boundary conditions that is smooth enough. A possible choice of the function
W is
for
and
. Then,
is the solution of the equation
satisfying the initial condition
and boundary conditions
The symbol
denotes the Bochner space of functions
f such that
for
and
with
being the norm in Banach space
B. Let
a be a bilinear form defined by
for all
.
Then, the variational formulation of Equation (
60) reads as:
Find
such that
and
satisfies Equation (
61) and
almost everywhere in
.
It can be shown that the bilinear form
a is continuous and satisfies a Gårding inequality, which implies the existence of a unique solution to this problem (see [
4]).
The Crank–Nicolson scheme is used for time discretization. Let
and denote
The Crank–Nicolson scheme has the form
for
.
Let
be a wavelet basis for the space
such that
normalized in the
-norm is the wavelet basis for the space
. Let
be a finite-dimensional subset of
with
s levels of wavelets, i.e.,
has the structure in Equation (
31), and denote
. The Galerkin method consists in finding
such that
for all
. Setting
and expanding
in a basis
, i.e.,
the vector of coefficients
is the solution of the system of linear algebraic equations
, where
and
It is obvious that and depend on the time level , but for simplicity the index l is omitted.
The stability of the Crank–Nicolson scheme and error estimates for the Galerkin method combined with the Crank–Nicolson scheme have been already studied (see, e.g., [
4,
5,
6] and references therein). For quadratic spline basis functions and for sufficiently smooth solutions, the
-norm of the error depends on the error of approximation of function representing the initial condition in the space
and the term of order
, where
h represents the spatial step that is in this case for
N basis functions given by
.
In the following, the structure of a discretization matrix is studied. Using the Jacobi diagonal preconditioner
, where the diagonal elements of
satisfy
gives the preconditioned system
with
As is already known from the previous section, the matrix arising from discretization of the differential operator
is sparse and has the structure displayed in
Figure 1 (middle). Hence, the main focus is on properties of the matrix
corresponding to the integral, i.e., the matrix
with entries
For the Galerkin method with the standard spline basis, the matrix
is full. However, it is known that, for integral operators with some types of kernels and for wavelet bases with vanishing moments, many entries of discretization matrices are small and can be thresholded and the matrices can be approximated with matrices that are sparse or quasi-sparse (see, e.g., [
4,
18,
29,
30]). The following theorem provides the decay estimates for the entries of the matrix
corresponding to general wavelets with
L vanishing moments.
Theorem 5. Let Ψ
be a wavelet basis with L vanishing moments, i.e., Conditions (i)–(iv) from Definition 1 are satisfied. Let be wavelets that are generated from wavelets , , respectively, via translations and dilations as in Equation (21). Denote by the maximum of the lengths of the supports of and and Denote , , . If , thenwith Consequently, if is a bounded set such that the functionsatisfies , then there exists a constant C independent of such thatfor all wavelets and such that the set satisfies . Proof. The proof is based on Taylor expansion of the kernel in a similar way as in [
18,
29]. Let the centers of the supports of
and
be denoted by
and
, respectively. If
, then the function
K defined by Equation (
80) satisfies
. By the Taylor theorem, there exists a function
P that is a polynomial of degree at most
with respect to
x and a function
Q that is a polynomial of degree at most
with respect to
y such that
where
and
for some
. Due to
L vanishing moments of the wavelets
and
,
is obtained and similarly for
Q.
Using Property (ii) from Definition 1 gives
This proves the theorem. ☐
Let
with
defined by Equation (
73). Then, the discretization matrix
is the sum of the matrix
and the matrix arising from discretization of the differential operator
. Due to Theorem 5, many entries of the matrix
are small and can be thresholded, and thus the matrix
can be represented by a sparse matrix. The structure of the truncated matrix
is presented in
Figure 3. This matrix contains only entries larger than
, and it was computed for the option with parameters from Example 1 and the wavelet basis from this paper containing eight levels of wavelets.
In some papers [
18,
29], decay estimates were derived for integrals with a kernel
K that has a singularity or a maximal value on the diagonal
and decays with
. However, in some models such as the Merton model, with the density from Equation (
2) that is used in numerical experiments in
Section 4, these estimates cannot be used, because the kernel has maximal values for
and is decaying exponentially with
.
Since the matrix
is the same for all time levels, the system matrix can be computed, analyzed and compressed only once as a preprocessing step and then one can work with the compressed matrix. However, since the computation of all integrals in Equation (
76) can be time consuming, it is more convenient to use estimates in Equations (
78) and (
81) to compute only significant entries of the matrix
. More precisely, the following strategy can be used:
- (1)
Choose a tolerance .
- (2)
Compute all the entries for indexes and such that .
- (3)
Based on estimate in Equation (
81), set the level
such that
for any
and
such that
.
- (4)
If
, then use a local estimate in Equation (
81) to compute only entries for which it is not guaranteed that
.
Note that Step (4) enables one to obtain the matrix and thus also with more zero elements. To obtain a sparse matrix, it is sufficient to use Steps (1)–(3), i.e., to compute entries for which and entries in regions where is not smooth, and set to zero any other entries.
The impact of the truncation on the solution of the system in Equation (
74) can be described as follows. Let
be the truncated matrix and
be the solution of the system
. If
then
(see [
31]). Moreover, the matrices
have uniformly bounded condition numbers [
4], i.e.,
with
C independent on
s. Hence, if a threshold is chosen that is small enough, then
will be close to
.