I'm not sure what the difference between statistics and machine-learning is supposed to be, seriously. The theoretical foundation of any machine learning algori

I'm not sure what the difference between statistics and machine-learning is supposed to be, seriously. The theoretical foundation of any machine learning algorithm is probability theory and statistics. Is machine learning implied to be a more "hands on" approach, to focus more on learning a set of techniques than on learning the theoretical underpinning of such techniques? Is it basically "statistical engineering"? The least charitable interpretation would be that it's just a hipper term for it. This article pretty much sums up my impression of the divide: http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learning-fight/ http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learn...