Approximating ambit fields via Fourier methods

Abstract

In their paper Barndorff-Nielsen et al. [4] employ so called ambit fields to model electricity spot-forward dynamics. We briefly introduce and discuss ambit fields, and introduce a novel method for approximating general ambit fields by a linear combination of ambit fields driven by exponential kernel functions (as has already been done in the null-spatial case of Lévy semistationary processes by Benth et al. [11]) by approximating the deterministic kernel function by a carefully selected finite sum. Moreover, we shall study examples, in the setting of modelling electricity forward markets, of ambit fields with singular kernel functions to illustrate the usefulness of our method for pricing purposes.