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. Stochastic modeling is also used in social science. It is also used in finance, due to seemingly random changes in financial markets as well as in medicine, linguistics, music, media, colour theory, botany, manufacturing, and geomorphology. Stochasticity is used in many different fields, including the natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, ecology, neuroscience, and physics, as well as technology and engineering fields such as image processing, signal processing, information theory, computer science, cryptography, and telecommunications. Furthermore, in probability theory, the formal concept of a stochastic process is also referred to as a random process.

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Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselves, these two terms are often used synonymously. Stochastic (from Greek στόχος (stókhos) 'aim, guess' ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. ( January 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve the article by merging similar sections and removing unneeded subheaders. This article may have too many section headers dividing up its content.

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