Some nihilism for the weekend courtesy of one of the first recordings made by the original Buzzcocks line-up on 28th December 1976. Given that boredom was one of the themes of punk's 'rebellion', including against the 'boring' 15 minute album tracks of the time, you might think this fitted perfectly. But in fact it is about boredom with the punk movement itself even though it was only a few months old in the UK.
The guitar solo features two notes repeated 66 times.
15:30
Compact Brownian surfaces
Please join us from 1500-1530 for tea and coffee outside the lecture theatre before the talk.
Abstract
We describe the compact scaling limits of uniformly random quadrangulations with boundaries on a surface of arbitrary fixed genus. These limits, called Brownian surfaces, are homeomorphic to the surface of the given genus with or without boundaries depending on the scaling regime of the boundary perimeters of the quadrangulation. They are constructed by appropriate gluings of pieces derived from Brownian geometrical objects (the Brownian plane and half-plane). In this talk, I will review their definition and discuss possible alternative constructions. This is based on joint work with Jérémie Bettinelli.
16:00
Path Shadowing Monte-Carlo: a new approach to prediction
Abstract
A Path Shadowing Monte-Carlo method provides prediction of future paths given any generative model.
At a given date, it averages future quantities over generated price paths whose past history matches, or “shadows”, the actual (observed) history.
We test our approach using paths generated from a maximum entropy model of financial prices,
based on the recently introduced “Scattering Spectra” which are multi-scale analogues of the standard skewness and kurtosis.
This model promotes diversity of generated paths while reproducing the main statistical properties of financial prices, including stylized facts on volatility roughness.
Our method yields state-of-the-art predictions for future realized volatility. It also allows one to determine conditional option smiles for the S&P500.
These smiles depend only on the distribution of the price process, and are shown to outperform both the current version of the Path Dependent Volatility model and the option market itself.
11:00
Asymptotic behavior of simple random walk on uniform spanning tree and loop-erased random walk.
Abstract
Random walks on random graphs are associated with diffusion in disordered media. In this talk, the graphs of interest are uniform spanning tree (UST) and loop-erased random walk (LERW). First I will demonstrate some asymptotic behavior of the simple random walk on the three-dimensional UST. Next I will discuss annealed transition probability of the simple random walk on high-dimensional LERWs.