medium · Quantitative Finance stochastic

In the context of the Feynman-Kac formula, what is the significance of the 'Initial Value Problem' versus a 'Terminal Value Problem'?

  1. Monte Carlo methods estimate the expectation numerically forward in time, while PDEs solve it via a spatial grid.
  2. Expectations can be computed from any starting time by conditioning on the state variable observed at that time.
  3. Finance usually solves terminal value problems, where the payoff is known at T and we solve backward to t.
  4. Feynman-Kac also applies directly to initial value problems, such as the heat equation in physics.

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