Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposal introduces innovative ideas, concepts and techniques that contribute to the theory of modern financial mathematics and the use of signal processing methods in probabilistic settings.The application areas are arbitrage, hedging and pricing in financial mathematics as well as some topics from image processing and nonlinear regression of hedge funds. Arbitrage refers to the possibility of making a profit without risk and hedging, in broad terms, means the re-adjustment of portfolio positions to meet future financial obligations. These key foundational concepts are used to build mathematical marketmodels; in particular, they provide the derived notion of price for financial instruments. One of our research projects describes a new non probabilistic approach to the foundational notions of arbitrage, hedging and pricing, the approach emphasizes questions of the type: what are the properties of an unfolding stock chart for a financial stock? This question is dealt with without considering the probability that the path may have in a certain stochastic model. The proposed point of view carries empirical implications for the possible range of prices of financial products as well as risk analysis. Some of these implications will be developed in the proposed research.Another research project develops new mathematical tools for image and video processing as well as cell recognition in two and three dimensional images. This project leads to advances in technological innovations, a main goal is to implement these new algorithms in software that will be made available to the research community. A related project proposes to make use of the new signal processing methodology of compressed sensing in a financial context in order to estimate the behavior of a portfolio in the presence of scarce observations. The methodology offers several potential advantages as it accounts for the joint probability of risk factors.