Weak Form Recovery of Heston Type Stochastic Dynamics

Abstract

Estimating the coupled drift, diffusion, and leverage structure of a stochastic-volatility model directly from a price path is an unresolved inverse problem: Kramers--Moyal increment estimators amplify sampling noise as the step shrinks, weak-form SINDy has not been extended to coupled two-dimensional diffusions or to the return--variance cross-variation producing leverage, and Heston calibration typically relies on option-implied surfaces rather than the physical-measure path. We extend the spatial weak-form Galerkin framework to the Heston model: variance increments, squared variance increments, squared price increments, and their cross-product are projected onto shared Gaussian kernels in variance space, giving one LASSO regression that jointly recovers mean reversion $\kappa$, long-run variance $\theta$, vol-of-vol $\xi$, and leverage correlation $\rho$, with a drift-informed bias correction analogous to scalar-SDE diffusion debiasing. Across 30 daily-observed Heston simulations, $\xi$, $\rho$, and $\rho \xi$ are recovered with median errors under 2\%. Applied to S\&P 500 data spanning the 2007--2010 crisis, the method recovers negative leverage consistent with the documented equity leverage effect, and a 50-stock Indian panel shows the same sign under several independent variance proxies.

18 pages, 13 figures