You are right it's marketing for a large part. The term Machine Learning somehow implies that the algorithms are more intelligent (or even sentient) then they a

You are right it's marketing for a large part. The term Machine Learning somehow implies that the algorithms are more intelligent (or even sentient) then they actually are. That said, Machine Learning is different from statistics. Statistics are mostly concerned with modeling real world phenomena. Machine Learning is trying to build models that can take a training set and generalize to unseen data without building a specific model for that dataset.