Statistical Spatially Inhomogeneous Diffusion Inference
This addresses a statistical challenge in fields like biophysics and finance by providing a method for accurate diffusion inference, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing nonparametric estimation with neural networks.
The paper tackles the problem of inferring drift and spatially-inhomogeneous diffusion tensors from discretely-observed data in stochastic differential equations, achieving minimax optimal convergence rates with neural network-based estimators and demonstrating accuracy in numerical experiments.
Inferring a diffusion equation from discretely-observed measurements is a statistical challenge of significant importance in a variety of fields, from single-molecule tracking in biophysical systems to modeling financial instruments. Assuming that the underlying dynamical process obeys a $d$-dimensional stochastic differential equation of the form $$\mathrm{d}\boldsymbol{x}_t=\boldsymbol{b}(\boldsymbol{x}_t)\mathrm{d} t+Σ(\boldsymbol{x}_t)\mathrm{d}\boldsymbol{w}_t,$$ we propose neural network-based estimators of both the drift $\boldsymbol{b}$ and the spatially-inhomogeneous diffusion tensor $D = ΣΣ^{T}$ and provide statistical convergence guarantees when $\boldsymbol{b}$ and $D$ are $s$-Hölder continuous. Notably, our bound aligns with the minimax optimal rate $N^{-\frac{2s}{2s+d}}$ for nonparametric function estimation even in the presence of correlation within observational data, which necessitates careful handling when establishing fast-rate generalization bounds. Our theoretical results are bolstered by numerical experiments demonstrating accurate inference of spatially-inhomogeneous diffusion tensors.