4 ms·

Slightly OT, but what exactly is the difference between machine learning and statistics?

• vcdimension 10y ago
  funding
• capnrefsmmat 10y ago
  You may enjoy Leo Breiman's famous article "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures": http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726 http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726 What he calls "algorithmic modeling" is what I see as machine learning style thinking. Naturally there's a lot of overlap and people in stats and ML often do related work (our statistics department, at CMU, collaborates a lot with the machine learning department), but there's a basic mindset difference.
  • S4M 10y ago
    Really interesting article. After reading it, it seems that statistics are about devising a model (like y=ax+b+epsilon) and then fitting it on the data while machine learning algorithms are about letting the data make their own model).
    • nfoz 10y ago
      I think a statistical view of that dichotomy is "parametric statistics" vs. "non-parametric statistics": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonparametric_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonparametric_statistics I see "machine learning" as exploring computational approaches to non-parametric statistics. The idea of data-driven model-estimation is not outside the scope of "statistics".
• kgwgk 10y ago
  Machine learning Statistics network, graphs model weights parameters learning fitting generalization test set performance supervised learning regression/classification unsupervised learning density estimation, clustering large grant = $1,000,000 large grant = $50,000 nice place to have a meeting: nice place to have a meeting: Snowbird, Utah, French Alps Las Vegas in August http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learning-fight/ http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learn...