It works by fitting curves. Whether you have a (presumably mathematical) "Statistical interpretation" or not is basically irrelevant in terms of what it actuall

It works by fitting curves. Whether you have a (presumably mathematical) "Statistical interpretation" or not is basically irrelevant in terms of what it actually does and what we should be conveying to people who aren't knowledgeable of the field. This is not about an academic argument. Putting stats right there in the name is vastly, vastly more informative than "Learning" which has the nuance for 99% of people as something requiring intelligence and is misleading. Hence the AI cons all pop up immediately there are some public ML wins called "Learning." Generalizing from data is actually what statistics does. It's what ML is. People like Hinton, Wasserman, Tibrishani et al seem to agree that ML is statistics but even that isn't what I'm talking about here.