An Optimization Approach to Weak Approximation of Lévy-Driven Stochastic Differential Equations

We propose an optimization approach to weak approximation of Levy-driven stochastic differential equations. We employ a mathematical programming framework to obtain numerically upper and lower bound estimates of the target expectation, where the optimization procedure ends up with a polynomial programming problem. An advantage of our approach is that all we need is a closed form of the Levy measure, not the exact simulation knowledge of the increments or of a shot noise representation for the time discretization approximation. We also investigate methods for approximation at some different intermediate time points simultaneously.