A general dimension reduction technique for derivative pricing

ABSTRACT For a trajectory simulated from s standardized independent normal variates ε = (ε1, . . . , εs )1, the payoff of a European option can be represented as max[g(ε), 0], where the function g(ε) is assumed to be differentiable and it relates to the nature of the derivative securities. In this paper, we develop a new simulation technique by introducing an orthogonal class of transformation to ε so that the function g is instead generated from g(Aε), where A is an s-dimensional orthogonal matrix. The matrix A is optimally determined so that the effective dimension of the underlying function is minimized, thereby enhancing the quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method. The proposed simulation approach has the advantage of greater generality and has a wide range of applications as long as the problem of interest can be represented by g(ε). The flexibility of our proposed technique is illustrated by applying it to two high-dimensional applications: Asian basket options and European call options with a stochastic volatility model. We benchmark our proposed method against well-known efficient simulation algorithms that have been advocated in these applications. The numerical results demonstrate that our proposed technique can be an extremely powerful simulation method when combined with QMC.