Fast swaption pricing in Gaussian term structure models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rapid and precise numerical approach for pricing European swaptions within multi-factor Gaussian models, significantly aiding model calibration to volatility surfaces.

Contribution

It presents a novel hyperplane approximation of the exercise boundary, simplifying multi-dimensional integrals into an analytical form for faster computation.

Findings

Method outperforms previous techniques in speed and accuracy

Demonstrates effective model calibration acceleration

Validated against numerical integration benchmarks

Abstract

We propose a fast and accurate numerical method for pricing European swaptions in multi-factor Gaussian term structure models. Our method can be used to accelerate the calibration of such models to the volatility surface. The pricing of an interest rate option in such a model involves evaluating a multi-dimensional integral of the payoff of the claim on a domain where the payoff is positive. In our method, we approximate the exercise boundary of the state space by a hyperplane tangent to the maximum probability point on the boundary and simplify the multi-dimensional integration into an analytical form. The maximum probability point can be determined using the gradient descent method. We demonstrate that our method is superior to previous methods by comparing the results to the price obtained by numerical integration.