Bayesian Inference for Non-synchronously Observed Diffusions

Abstract. We consider the problem of Bayesian inference for bi-variate data observed in time but with observation times which occur non-synchronously. In particular, this occurs in a wide variety of applications in finance, such as high-frequency trading or crude oil futures trading. We adopt a diffusion model for the data and formulate a Bayesian model with priors on unknown parameters along with a latent representation for the so-called missing data. We then consider computational methodology to fit the model using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We have to resort to time-discretization methods, as the complete data likelihood is intractable and this can cause considerable issues for MCMC when the data are observed in low frequencies. In the context of high frequency observations, we present a simple particle MCMC method based on an Euler–Maruyama time discretization, which can be enhanced using multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). In the low frequency observation regime, we introduce a novel bridging representation of the posterior in continuous time to deal with the issues of MCMC in this case. This representation is discretized and fitted using MCMC and MLMC. We apply our methodology to real and simulated data to establish the efficacy of our methodology.