Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A doubly stochastic matrix is a square matrix of nonnegative real numbers with each row and column summing to 1. A substochastic matrix is a real square matrix whose row sums are all ; In the same vein, one may define a probability vector as a vector whose elements are nonnegative real numbers which sum to 1. Thus, each row of a right ...
The word stochastic in English was originally used as an adjective with the definition "pertaining to conjecturing", and stemming from a Greek word meaning "to aim at a mark, guess", and the Oxford English Dictionary gives the year 1662 as its earliest occurrence. [1]
A stochastic or random process can be defined as a collection of random variables that is indexed by some mathematical set, meaning that each random variable of the stochastic process is uniquely associated with an element in the set. [4] [5] The set used to index the random variables is called the index set.
In nuclear physics, random matrices were introduced by Eugene Wigner to model the nuclei of heavy atoms. [1] [2] Wigner postulated that the spacings between the lines in the spectrum of a heavy atom nucleus should resemble the spacings between the eigenvalues of a random matrix, and should depend only on the symmetry class of the underlying evolution. [4]
A random variable (also called random quantity, aleatory variable, or stochastic variable) is a mathematical formalization of a quantity or object which depends on random events. [1] The term 'random variable' in its mathematical definition refers to neither randomness nor variability [ 2 ] but instead is a mathematical function in which
In probability theory, a martingale is a sequence of random variables (i.e., a stochastic process) for which, at a particular time, the conditional expectation of the next value in the sequence is equal to the present value, regardless of all prior values. Stopped Brownian motion is an example of a martingale. It can model an even coin-toss ...
Independence is a fundamental notion in probability theory, as in statistics and the theory of stochastic processes.Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent [1] if, informally speaking, the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other or, equivalently, does not affect the odds.
An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line which starts at 0, and at each step moves +1 or −1 with equal probability. Other examples include the path traced by a molecule as it travels in a liquid or a gas (see Brownian motion ), the search path of a foraging animal, or the price of a fluctuating ...