This volume contains 6 chapters which cover several modern topics of quantitative finance and reflect the most significant trends currently shaping this field. The chapters discuss in detail and make original contributions to stochastic/fractional volatility models and their asymptotic solutions (Chapter 1); equity trading, optimal portfolios and related problems (Chapters 2, 5, 6); machine learning and NLP (Chapters 2, 3); and economic scenario generation (Chapter 4), and are written by the leading experts in the field. This book will be useful for both researchers and practitioners.

This book describes several techniques, first invented in physics for solving problems of heat and mass transfer, and applies them to various problems of mathematical finance defined in domains with moving boundaries. These problems include: (a) semi-closed form pricing of options in the one-factor models with time-dependent barriers (Bachelier, Hull-White, CIR, CEV); (b) analyzing an interconnected banking system in the structural credit risk model with default contagion; (c) finding first hitting time density for a reducible diffusion process; (d) describing the exercise boundary of American options; (e) calculating default boundary for the structured default problem; (f) deriving a semi-closed form solution for optimal mean-reverting trading strategies; to mention but some.The main methods used in this book are generalized integral transforms and heat potentials. To find a semi-closed form solution, we need to solve a linear or nonlinear Volterra equation of the second kind and then represent the option price as a one-dimensional integral. Our analysis shows that these methods are computationally more efficient than the corresponding finite-difference methods for the backward or forward Kolmogorov PDEs (partial differential equations) while providing better accuracy and stability.We extend a large number of known results by either providing solutions on complementary or extended domains where the solution is not known yet or modifying these techniques and applying them to new types of equations, such as the Bessel process. The book contains several novel results broadly applicable in physics, mathematics, and engineering.

This monograph presents a novel numerical approach to solving partial integro-differential equations arising in asset pricing models with jumps, which greatly exceeds the efficiency of existing approaches. The method, based on pseudo-differential operators and several original contributions to the theory of finite-difference schemes, is new as applied to the Levy processes in finance, and is herein presented for the first time in a single volume. The results within, developed in a series of research papers, are collected and arranged together with the necessary background material from Levy processes, the modern theory of finite-difference schemes, the theory of M-matrices and EM-matrices, etc., thus forming a self-contained work that gives the reader a smooth introduction to the subject. For readers with no knowledge of finance, a short explanation of the main financial terms and notions used in the book is given in the glossary. The latter part of the book demonstrates the efficacy of the method by solving some typical problems encountered in computational finance, including structural default models with jumps, and local stochastic volatility models with stochastic interest rates and jumps. The author also adds extra complexity to the traditional statements of these problems by taking into account jumps in each stochastic component while all jumps are fully correlated, and shows how this setting can be efficiently addressed within the framework of the new method. Written for non-mathematicians, this book will appeal to financial engineers and analysts, econophysicists, and researchers in applied numerical analysis. It can also be used as an advance course on modern finite-difference methods or computational finance.

The concept of local volatility as well as the local volatility model are one of the classical topics of mathematical finance. Although the existing literature is wide, there still exist various problems that have not drawn sufficient attention so far, for example: a) construction of analytical solutions of the Dupire equation for an arbitrary shape of the local volatility function; b) construction of parametric or non-parametric regression of the local volatility surface suitable for fast calibration; c) no-arbitrage interpolation and extrapolation of the local and implied volatility surfaces; d) extension of the local volatility concept beyond the Black-Scholes model, etc. Also, recent progresses in deep learning and artificial neural networks as applied to financial engineering have made it reasonable to look again at various classical problems of mathematical finance including that of building a no-arbitrage local/implied volatility surface and calibrating it to the option market data.This book was written with the purpose of presenting new results previously developed in a series of papers and explaining them consistently, starting from the general concept of Dupire, Derman and Kani and then concentrating on various extensions proposed by the author and his co-authors. This volume collects all the results in one place, and provides some typical examples of the problems that can be efficiently solved using the proposed methods. This also results in a faster calibration of the local and implied volatility surfaces as compared to standard approaches.The methods and solutions presented in this volume are new and recently published, and are accompanied by various additional comments and considerations. Since from the mathematical point of view, the level of details is closer to the applied rather than to the abstract or pure theoretical mathematics, the book could also be recommended to graduate students with majors in computational or quantitative finance, financial engineering or even applied mathematics. In particular, the author used to teach some topics of this book as a part of his special course on computational finance at the Tandon School of Engineering, New York University.