# Quasi-Monte Carlo for Discontinuous Integrands with Singularities along the Boundary of the Unit Cube

### Abstract

This paper studies randomized quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling for discontinuous integrands having singularities along the boundary of the unit cube $[0,1]^d$. Both discontinuities and singularities are extremely common in the pricing and hedging of financial derivatives and have a tremendous impact on the accuracy of QMC. It was previously known that the root mean square error of randomized QMC is only $o(n^{1/2})$ for discontinuous functions with singularities. We find that under some mild conditions, randomized QMC yields an expected error of $O(n^{-1/2-1/(4d-2)+\epsilon })$ for arbitrarily small $\epsilon >0$. Moreover, one can get a better rate if the boundary of discontinuities is parallel to some coordinate axes. As a by-product, we find that the expected error rate attains $O(n^{-1+\epsilon })$ if the discontinuities are QMC-friendly, in the sense that all the discontinuity boundaries are parallel to coordinate axes. The results can be used to assess the QMC accuracy for some typical problems from financial engineering.

Type
Publication
Mathematics of Computation, 87(314), 2857-2870
##### Zhijian He
###### Associate Professor

My research interests include Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte methods with applications in finance and statistics.