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DIPARTIMENTO DI MATEMATICA

Stochastics and Applications - 2024

Organizzato da: proff. Lorenzo Cerboni Baiardi e Stefano Pagliarani

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We consider a model of a simple financial system consisting of a leveraged investor that invests in a risky asset and manages risk by using value-at-risk (VaR). The VaR is estimated by using past data via an adaptive expectation scheme. We show that the leverage dynamics can be described by a dynamical system of slow-fast type associated with a unimodal map on [0,1] with an additive heteroscedastic noise whose variance is related to the portfolio rebalancing frequency to target leverage. In absence of noise the model is purely deterministic and the parameter space splits into two regions: (i) a region with a globally attracting fixed point or a 2-cycle; (ii) a dynamical core region, where the map could exhibit chaotic behavior. Whenever the model is randomly perturbed, we prove the existence of a unique stationary density with bounded variation, the stochastic stability of the process, and the almost certain existence and continuity of the Lyapunov exponent for the stationary measure. We then use deep neural networks to estimate map parameters from a short time series. Using this method, we estimate the model in a large dataset of US commercial banks over the period 2001-2014. We find that the parameters of a substantial fraction of banks lie in the dynamical core, and their leverage time series are consistent with a chaotic behavior. We also present evidence that the time series of the leverage of large banks tend to exhibit chaoticity more frequently than those of small banks.
Modeling traffic dynamics has highlighted some universal properties of emergent phenomena, like the stop and go congestion when the vehicle density overcomes a certain threshold. The congestion formation on a urban road network is one of the main issues for the development of a sustainable mobility in the future smart cities and different models have been proposed. The quantification of the congestion degree for a city has been considered by various authors and data driven models have been develpoed using the large data sets on individual mobility provided by the Information Communication Technologies. However the simulation results suggest the existence of universal features for the transition to global congested states on a road network. We cope with the question if simple transport models on graph can reproduce universal features of congestion formation and the existence of control parameters is still an open problem. We propose a reductionist approach to this problem studying a simple transport model on a homogeneous road network by means of a random process on a graph. Each node represents a location and the links connect the different locations. We assume that each node has a finite transport capacity and it can contain a finite number of particles (vehicles). The dynamics is realized by a random walk on graphs where each node has a finite flow and move particles toward the connected nodes according to given transition rates (link weights). Each displacement is possible if the number of particles in the destination nodes is smaller than their maximal capacity. The graph structure can be very simple, like a uniform grid, but we have also considered random graphs with maximum in and out degree, to simulate more realistic transport networks. We study the properties the stationary distributions of the particles on the graph and the possibility of the applying the entropy concept of Statistical Mechanics to characterize the stationary distributions and to understand the congestion formation.
We prove a second-order smooth-fit principle for a class of infinite-dimensional singular stochastic control problems. These can be thought of as spatial monotone-follower problems and find applications in spatial models of production and climate transition. Let (D, M, μ) be a finite measure space and consider the Hilbert space H := L^2(D, M, μ; R). Let then X be a H-valued stochastic process on a suitable complete probability space, whose evolution is determined through an SPDE driven by a linear operator A and affected by a cylindrical Brownian motion. The evolution of X is controlled linearly via a vector-valued control consisting of the direction and the intensity of action, a real-valued nondecreasing right-continuous stochastic process, adapted to the underlying filtration. The goal is to minimize an infinite time-horizon, discounted convex cost-functional. By combining properties of semiconcave functions and techniques from viscosity theory, we first show that the value function of the problem V is a C^{1,Lip}(H)-viscosity solution to the corresponding dynamic programming equation, which here takes the form of a variational inequality with gradient constraint. Then, allowing the decision maker to choose only the intensity of the control, and requiring that the given direction of control n is an eigenvector of the linear operator A, we establish that the directional derivative V_n is of class C^1(H), hence a second-order smooth-fit principle in the controlled direction holds for V . This result is obtained by exploiting a connection to optimal stopping and combining results and techniques from convex analysis and viscosity theory.