It is just glorified curve fitting. Glorified curve fitting is a very rich field. Another way of thinking about it (described in Wasserman's book) is that stat

It is just glorified curve fitting. Glorified curve fitting is a very rich field. Another way of thinking about it (described in Wasserman's book) is that statistics is the inverse problem of probability. Probability theory asks: given a process, what does its data look like? Statistics asks: given data, what process might have generated it?