Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a medium.
In probability theory and related fields, a stochastic or random process is a mathematical object usually defined as a family of random variables in a probability space, where the index of the family often has the interpretation of time. Stochastic processes are widely used as mathematical models of systems and phenomena that appear to vary in a random manner. Examples include the growth of a bacterial population, an electrical current fluctuating due to thermal noise, or the movement of a gas molecule. Stochastic processes have applications in many disciplines such as biology, chemistry, ecology, neuroscience, physics, image processing, signal processing, control theory, information theory, computer science, and telecommunications. Furthermore, seemingly random changes in financial markets have motivated the extensive use of stochastic processes in finance.
In probability theory and statistics, a Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic process describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happens next depends only on the state of affairs now." A countably infinite sequence, in which the chain moves state at discrete time steps, gives a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC). A continuous-time process is called a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). Markov processes are named in honor of the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov.
In mathematics, the Wiener process is a real-valued continuous-time stochastic process named in honor of American mathematician Norbert Wiener for his investigations on the mathematical properties of the one-dimensional Brownian motion. It is often also called Brownian motion due to its historical connection with the physical process of the same name originally observed by Scottish botanist Robert Brown. It is one of the best known Lévy processes and occurs frequently in pure and applied mathematics, economics, quantitative finance, evolutionary biology, and physics.
Stochastic is the property of being well-described by a random probability distribution. Stochasticity and randomness are technically distinct concepts: the former refers to a modeling approach, while the latter describes phenomena; in everyday conversation, however, these terms are often used interchangeably. In probability theory, the formal concept of a stochastic process is also referred to as a random process.
Probability is a measure of the likeliness that an event will occur. Probability is used to quantify an attitude of mind towards some proposition whose truth is not certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "A specific event will occur." The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain is it that the event will occur?" The certainty that is adopted can be described in terms of a numerical measure, and this number, between 0 and 1 is called the probability. Probability theory is used extensively in statistics, mathematics, science and philosophy to draw conclusions about the likelihood of potential events and the underlying mechanics of complex systems.
A stochastic differential equation (SDE) is a differential equation in which one or more of the terms is a stochastic process, resulting in a solution which is also a stochastic process. SDEs have many applications throughout pure mathematics and are used to model various behaviours of stochastic models such as stock prices, random growth models or physical systems that are subjected to thermal fluctuations.
In the mathematical theory of stochastic processes, local time is a stochastic process associated with semimartingale processes such as Brownian motion, that characterizes the amount of time a particle has spent at a given level. Local time appears in various stochastic integration formulas, such as Tanaka's formula, if the integrand is not sufficiently smooth. It is also studied in statistical mechanics in the context of random fields.
In probability theory, the Schramm–Loewner evolution with parameter κ, also known as stochastic Loewner evolution (SLEκ), is a family of random planar curves that have been proven to be the scaling limit of a variety of two-dimensional lattice models in statistical mechanics. Given a parameter κ and a domain U in the complex plane, it gives a family of random curves in U, with κ controlling how much the curve turns. There are two main variants of SLE, chordal SLE which gives a family of random curves from two fixed boundary points, and radial SLE, which gives a family of random curves from a fixed boundary point to a fixed interior point. These curves are defined to satisfy conformal invariance and a domain Markov property.
In the stochastic calculus, Tanaka's formula for the Brownian motion states that
An -superprocess, , within mathematics probability theory is a stochastic process on that is usually constructed as a special limit of near-critical branching diffusions.
In mathematics – specifically, in stochastic analysis – an Itô diffusion is a solution to a specific type of stochastic differential equation. That equation is similar to the Langevin equation used in physics to describe the Brownian motion of a particle subjected to a potential in a viscous fluid. Itô diffusions are named after the Japanese mathematician Kiyosi Itô.
More colloquially, a first passage time in a stochastic system, is the time taken for a state variable to reach a certain value. Understanding this metric allows one to further understand the physical system under observation, and as such has been the topic of research in very diverse fields, from economics to ecology.
This page lists articles related to probability theory. In particular, it lists many articles corresponding to specific probability distributions. Such articles are marked here by a code of the form (X:Y), which refers to number of random variables involved and the type of the distribution. For example (2:DC) indicates a distribution with two random variables, discrete or continuous. Other codes are just abbreviations for topics. The list of codes can be found in the table of contents.
Mathematical finance, also known as quantitative finance and financial mathematics, is a field of applied mathematics, concerned with mathematical modeling in the financial field.
In probability theory, a piecewise-deterministic Markov process (PDMP) is a process whose behaviour is governed by random jumps at points in time, but whose evolution is deterministically governed by an ordinary differential equation between those times. The class of models is "wide enough to include as special cases virtually all the non-diffusion models of applied probability." The process is defined by three quantities: the flow, the jump rate, and the transition measure.
Mean-field particle methods are a broad class of interacting type Monte Carlo algorithms for simulating from a sequence of probability distributions satisfying a nonlinear evolution equation. These flows of probability measures can always be interpreted as the distributions of the random states of a Markov process whose transition probabilities depends on the distributions of the current random states. A natural way to simulate these sophisticated nonlinear Markov processes is to sample a large number of copies of the process, replacing in the evolution equation the unknown distributions of the random states by the sampled empirical measures. In contrast with traditional Monte Carlo and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods these mean-field particle techniques rely on sequential interacting samples. The terminology mean-field reflects the fact that each of the samples interacts with the empirical measures of the process. When the size of the system tends to infinity, these random empirical measures converge to the deterministic distribution of the random states of the nonlinear Markov chain, so that the statistical interaction between particles vanishes. In other words, starting with a chaotic configuration based on independent copies of initial state of the nonlinear Markov chain model, the chaos propagates at any time horizon as the size the system tends to infinity; that is, finite blocks of particles reduces to independent copies of the nonlinear Markov process. This result is called the propagation of chaos property. The terminology "propagation of chaos" originated with the work of Mark Kac in 1976 on a colliding mean-field kinetic gas model.
