I think you mean it's much more like science than math. Not that it's much more like alchemy than science. Machine learning research is very empirical. With a

I think you mean it's much more like science than math. Not that it's much more like alchemy than science. Machine learning research is very empirical. With a philosophy of doing lots of experiments and tests, and discovering what methods work best. That's what science is. No scientific field starts off with complete knowledge and understanding, they have to do a lot of experiments to discover the general laws. Some people dislike empiricism and want pure, provable math. Machine learning isn't a field of mathematics, at least not in practice. But that doesn't mean it's not a science.