My interpretation is that it is differentiated from statistical analysis in that there's a system that adapts its heuristics to trained and incoming data. The

My interpretation is that it is differentiated from statistical analysis in that there's a system that adapts its heuristics to trained and incoming data. The Cox model fits that definition. Perhaps you mean ML is synonymous with reinforcement learning, which is I think the closest thing to "tuned and adapted to changing data"? My interpretation of ML is that it's about evaluating statistical predictors without worrying about their internals. Those are the fundamental advances that have given us all the classical "machine learning" algorithms - random forests, SVMs, neural networks, etc. And the entire point of those techniques is that you can use them to evaluate a secret algorithm. Did we even read the same article? The entire fucking article is about whether the justice system is unduly influenced by a proprietary algorithm that has been sold to the system (and paid for by our tax dollars) but is not as smart or objective as it is sold to be. The entire article claims the algorithm is both inaccurate and racially biased, which their statistical analysis directly contradicts. They never once made the argument that an accurate and unbiased model should not be used.