Christian Bayer: The forward-reverse method for conditional diffusion processes

We derive stochastic representations for the finite dimensional distributions of a multidimensional diffusion on a fixed time interval, conditioned on the terminal state. The conditioning can be with respect to a fixed point or more generally with respect to some subset. The representations rely on a reverse process connected with the given (forward) diffusion as introduced by Milstein, Schoenmakers and Spokoiny in the context of density estimation. The corresponding Monte Carlo estimators have essentially root-N accuracy, and hence they do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We also present an application in statistics, in the context of the EM algorithm.

(Joint work with John Schoenmakers and Hilmar Mai.)