The convection–diffusion equation (with no sources or drains, ) can be viewed as a stochastic differential equation, describing random motion with diffusivity  and bias . For example, the equation can describe the Brownian motion of a single particle, where the variable  describes the probability distribution for the particle to be in a given position at a given time. The reason the equation can be used that way is because there is no mathematical difference between the probability distribution of a single particle, and the concentration profile of a collection of infinitely many particles (as long as the particles do not interact with each other).
The Langevin equation describes advection, diffusion, and other phenomena in an explicitly stochastic way. One of the simplest forms of the Langevin equation is when its "noise term" is Gaussian; in this case, the Langevin equation is exactly equivalent to the convection–diffusion equation. However, the Langevin equation is more general.