The local coupling of noise technique and its application to lower error bounds for strong approximation of SDEs with irregular coefficients (2505.00656v1)

Abstract: In recent years, interest in approximation methods for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with non-Lipschitz continuous coefficients has increased. We show lower bounds for the $L^p$-error of such methods in the case of approximation at a single point in time or globally in time. On the one hand, we show that for a large class of piecewise Lipschitz continuous drifts and non-additive diffusions the best possible $L^p$-error rate for final time approximation that can be achieved by any method based on finitely many evaluations of the driving Brownian motion is at most $3/4$, which was previously known only for additive diffusions. Moreover, we show that the best $L^p$-error rate for global approximation that can be achieved by any method based on finitely many evaluations of the driving Brownian motion is at most $1/2$ when the drift is locally bounded and the diffusion is locally Lipschitz continuous. For the derivation of the lower bounds we introduce a new method of proof: the local coupling of noise technique. Using this technique when approximating a solution $X$ of the SDE at the final time, a lower bound for the $L^p$-error of any approximation method based on evaluations of the driving Brownian motion at the points $t_1 < \dots < t_n$ can be determined by the $L^p$-distances of solutions of the same SDE on $[t_{i-1}, t_i]$ with initial values $X_{t_{i-1}}$ and driving Brownian motions that are coupled at $t_{i-1}, t_i$ and independent, conditioned on the values of the Brownian motion at $t_{i-1}, t_i$.