Convergence in total variation of the Euler-Maruyama scheme applied to diffusion processes with measurable drift coefficient and additive noise.

Summary We are interested in the Euler-Maruyama discretization of a stochastic differential equation in dimension $d$ with constant diffusion coefficient and bounded measurable drift coefficient. In the scheme, a randomization of the time variable is used to get rid of any regularity assumption of the drift in this variable. We prove weak convergence with order $1/2$ in total variation distance. When the drift has a spatial divergence in the sense of distributions with $\rho$-th power integrable with respect to the Lebesgue measure in space uniformly in time for some $\rho \ge d$, the order of convergence at the terminal time improves to $1$ up to some logarithmic factor. In dimension $d=1$, this result is preserved when the spatial derivative of the drift is a measure in space with total mass bounded uniformly in time. We confirm our theoretical analysis by numerical experiments.