Unconditionally positivity-preserving explicit Euler-type schemes for a generalized Ait-Sahalia model

The present work is devoted to strong approximations of a generalized Ait-Sahalia model arising from mathematical finance. The numerical study of the considered model faces essential difficulties caused by a drift that blows up at the origin, highly nonlinear drift and diffusion coefficients and positivity-preserving requirement. In this paper, a novel explicit Euler-type scheme is proposed, which is easily implementable and able to preserve positivity of the original model unconditionally, i.e., for any time step-size h>0. A mean-square convergence rate of order 0.5 is also obtained for the proposed scheme in both non-critical and general critical cases. Our work is motivated by the need to justify the multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) simulations for the underlying model, where the rate of mean-square convergence is required and the preservation of positivity is desirable particularly for large discretization time steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to propose an unconditionally positivity preserving explicit scheme with order 1/2 of mean-square convergence for the model. Numerical experiments are finally provided to confirm the theoretical findings.