Momentum-space approach to asymptotic expansion for stochastic filtering

This paper develops an asymptotic expansion technique in momentum space for stochastic filtering. It is shown that Fourier transformation combined with a polynomial-function approximation of the nonlinear terms gives a closed recursive system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for the relevant conditional distribution. Thanks to the simplicity of the ODE system, higher-order calculation can be performed easily. Furthermore, solving ODEs sequentially with small sub-periods with updated initial conditions makes it possible to implement a substepping method for asymptotic expansion in a numerically efficient way. This is found to improve the performance significantly where otherwise the approximation fails badly. The method is expected to provide a useful tool for more realistic financial modeling with unobserved parameters and also for problems involving nonlinear measure-valued processes. Copyright The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo 2014