> Modern Machine learning is entirely statistical inference In virtually no cases that I can think of does modern machine learning approach statistical inferen

> Modern Machine learning is entirely statistical inference In virtually no cases that I can think of does modern machine learning approach statistical inference. Statistical inference is always concerned with estimating confidence in beliefs and typically more concerned with the confidence in the model parameters rather than the model predictions. Machine learning is almost exclusively concern with model predictions and the performance of these predictions. You can easily have a model that is very useful for statistical inference but would be awful for machine learning, and most machine learning models (especially neural networks) as useless for statistical inference but great at prediction. This is not a critique of machine learning or vice versa, its just the case that these two approaches to modeling are quite different and used to solve very different problems.