Parallelizing Computation of Expected Values in Recombinant Binomial Trees

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2017-11-24

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Sai K. Popuri, Andrew M. Raim, Nagaraj K. Neerchal & Matthias K. Gobbert (2018) Parallelizing computation of expected values in recombinant binomial trees, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, 88:4, 657-674, DOI: 10.1080/00949655.2017.1402898

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This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the author.
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Abstract

Recombinant binomial trees are binary trees where each non-leaf node has two child nodes, but adjacent parents share a common child node. Such trees arise in option pricing in finance. For example, an option can be valued by evaluating the expected payoffs with respect to random paths in the tree. The cost to exactly compute expected values over random paths grows exponentially in the depth of the tree, rendering a serial computation of one branch at a time impractical. We propose a parallelization method that transforms the calculation of the expected value into an embarrassingly parallel problem by mapping the branches of the binomial tree to the processes in a multiprocessor computing environment. We also discuss a parallel Monte Carlo method and verify the convergence and the variance reduction behavior by simulation study. Performance results from R and Julia implementations are compared on a distributed computing cluster.