Machine Learning Is the New Statistics

Re:Machine Learning Is the New Statistics by fonnesbeck on Sunday October 16, 2016 @05:49PM (#12721184)

The statement "More wisdom potentially gets extracted when you apply Statistics to more (and better) data, but the analysis itself doesn’t improve with better data." simply isn't true. A hierarchical model, for example, is increasingly able to model subgroups and additional levels of hierarchy as more data are added. Penalized regression (or Bayesian regression) is another example -- the model is structurally different as you change the quantity of data.

The difference between ML and statistics is entirely semantic. Is logistic regression a ML method or a statistical method? It is both!

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Re:Machine Learning Is the New Statistics by danielrm26 on Sunday October 16, 2016 @06:07PM (#12721289)

Machine Learning is generically defined as a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building.

That's the part that's going to have the impact---automated improvement of the way Statistics is applied to data analysis.

Is that not major enough to be considered and discussed separately?

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Re:Machine Learning Is the New Statistics by taeric on Sunday October 16, 2016 @07:10PM (#12721614)

I think the kicker is that most machine learning is incrementing on a single model. Typically one known from statistics before. The weak learner track of combining models almost guess against this, but I think even then it is usually the same shape of model.

So, I actually agree to an extent. Much as computers can be seen as the "next logic". Only, it is such a "builds on" relationship that I think calling it next is dubious.

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