Machine learning

by John on December 3, 2008

Brendan O’Connor has a thoughtful comparison of machine learning and statistics this morning.

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1

Daniel Lemire 12.03.08 at 09:58

The main difference is that statistics was designed for an age where having 30 samples was a lot. Machine Learning copes with millions of samples. I do multidimensional analysis (OLAP) and deal with billions of samples.

Guess who is on top of the food chain! Me! ;-)

2

Brendan O'Connor 12.03.08 at 11:58

hah!

3

Karl Ove Hufthammer 12.04.08 at 05:01

One of the fortune cookies in R (package ‘fortunes’, fortune 50) has this quote:

To paraphrase provocatively, ‘machine learning is statistics minus any checking of models and assumptions’.
– Brian D. Ripley (about the difference between machine learning and statistics)
useR! 2004, Vienna (May 2004)

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