On nonlinear Feynman–Kac formulas for viscosity solutions of semilinear parabolic partial differential equations

Abstract

The classical Feynman–Kac identity builds a bridge between stochastic analysis and partial differential equations (PDEs) by providing stochastic representations for classical solutions of linear Kolmogorov PDEs. This opens the door for the derivation of sampling based Monte Carlo approximation methods, which can be meshfree and thereby stand a chance to approximate solutions of PDEs without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we extend the classical Feynman–Kac formula to certain semilinear Kolmogorov PDEs. More specifically, we identify suitable solutions of stochastic fixed point equations (SFPEs), which arise when the classical Feynman–Kac identity is formally applied to semilinear Kolmorogov PDEs, as viscosity solutions of the corresponding PDEs. This justifies, in particular, employing full-history recursive multilevel Picard (MLP) approximation algorithms, which have recently been shown to overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of solutions of SFPEs, in the numerical approximation of semilinear Kolmogorov PDEs.