Extracting implied information, like volatility and dividend, from observed option prices is a challenging task when dealing with American options, because of the complex-shaped early-exercise regions and the computational costs to solve the corresponding mathematical problem repeatedly. We will employ a data-driven machine learning approach to estimate the Black-Scholes implied volatility and the dividend yield for American options in a fast and robust way. To determine the implied volatility, the inverse function is approximated by an artificial neural network on the effective computational domain of interest, which decouples the offline (training) and online (prediction) stages and thus eliminates the need for an iterative process. In the case of an unknown dividend yield, we formulate the inverse problem as a calibration problem and determine simultaneously the implied volatility and dividend yield. For this, a generic and robust calibration framework, the Calibration Neural Network (CaNN), is introduced to estimate multiple parameters. It is shown that machine learning can be used as an efficient numerical technique to extract implied information from American options, particularly when considering multiple early-exercise regions due to negative interest rates.@en

We present a method for conditional time series forecasting based on an adaptation of the recent deep convolutional WaveNet architecture. The proposed network contains stacks of dilated convolutions that allow it to access a broad range of historical data when forecasting. It also uses a rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, and conditioning is performed by applying multiple convolutional filters in parallel to separate time series, which allows for the fast processing of data and the exploitation of the correlation structure between the multivariate time series. We test and analyze the performance of the convolutional network both unconditionally and conditionally for financial time series forecasting using the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the volatility index, the Chicago Board Options Exchange interest rate and several exchange rates, and we extensively compare its performance with those of the well-known autoregressive model and a long short-term memory network. We show that a convolutional network is well suited to regression-type problems and is able to effectively learn dependencies in and between the series without the need for long historical time series, that it is a time-efficient and easy-to-implement alternative to recurrent-type networks, and that it tends to outperform linear and recurrent models.

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A data-driven approach called CaNN (Calibration Neural Network) is proposed to calibrate financial asset price models using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Determining optimal values of the model parameters is formulated as training hidden neurons within a machine learning framework, based on available financial option prices. The framework consists of two parts: a forward pass in which we train the weights of the ANN off-line, valuing options under many different asset model parameter settings; and a backward pass, in which we evaluate the trained ANN-solver on-line, aiming to find the weights of the neurons in the input layer. The rapid on-line learning of implied volatility by ANNs, in combination with the use of an adapted parallel global optimization method, tackles the computation bottleneck and provides a fast and reliable technique for calibrating model parameters while avoiding, as much as possible, getting stuck in local minima. Numerical experiments confirm that this machine-learning framework can be employed to calibrate parameters of high-dimensional stochastic volatility models efficiently and accurately.

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