Geometric Brownian motion Geometric Brownian motion A geometric Brownian motion (GBM) (also known as exponential Brownian motion) is a continuous-time stochastic process in which the logarithm of the randomly varying quantity follows a Brownian motion (also called a Wiener process) with drift. It is an important example of stochastic processes satisfying a stochastic differential equation (SDE); in particular, it is used in mathematical finance to model stock prices in the Black–Scholes model. A stochastic process "S" is said to follow a GBM if it satisfies the following stochastic differential equation (SDE): where formula_2 is a Wiener process or Brownian motion, and formula_3 ('the
Brownian motion continuous stochastic process on a probability space (Ω, Σ, P) taking values in R. Then the following are equivalent: The infinitesimal generator (and hence characteristic operator) of a Brownian motion on R is easily calculated to be ½Δ, where Δ denotes the Laplace operator. In image processing and computer vision, the Laplacian operator has been used for various tasks such as blob and edge detection. This observation is useful in defining Brownian motion on an "m"-dimensional Riemannian manifold ("M", "g"): a Brownian motion on "M" is defined to be a diffusion on "M" whose characteristic operator formula_46 in local coordinates