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The signature is a collection of iterated integrals describing the "shape" of a path. It appears naturally in the Taylor expansions of controlled differential equations and, as a consequence, is arguably the central object within rough path theory. In this paper, we will consider the signature of Brownian motion with time, and present both new and recently developed approximations for some of its integrals. Since these integrals (or equivalent L\'{e}vy areas) are nonlinear functions of the Brownian path, they are not Gaussian and known to be challenging to simulate. To conclude the paper, we will present some applications of these approximations to the high order numerical simulation of stochastic differential equations (SDEs)., Comment: 69 pages, 12 figures

In this paper, we introduce a new simple approach to developing and establishing the convergence of splitting methods for a large class of stochastic differential equations (SDEs), including additive, diagonal and scalar noise types. The central idea is to view the splitting method as a replacement of the driving signal of an SDE, namely Brownian motion and time, with a piecewise linear path that yields a sequence of ODEs $-$ which can be discretized to produce a numerical scheme. This new way of understanding splitting methods is inspired by, but does not use, rough path theory. We show that when the driving piecewise linear path matches certain iterated stochastic integrals of Brownian motion, then a high order splitting method can be obtained. We propose a general proof methodology for establishing the strong convergence of these approximations that is akin to the general framework of Milstein and Tretyakov. That is, once local error estimates are obtained for the splitting method, then a global rate of convergence follows. This approach can then be readily applied in future research on SDE splitting methods. By incorporating recently developed approximations for iterated integrals of Brownian motion into these piecewise linear paths, we propose several high order splitting methods for SDEs satisfying a certain commutativity condition. In our experiments, which include the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross model and additive noise SDEs (noisy anharmonic oscillator, stochastic FitzHugh-Nagumo model, underdamped Langevin dynamics), the new splitting methods exhibit convergence rates of $O(h^{3/2})$ and outperform schemes previously proposed in the literature., Comment: 49 pages, 9 figures