Machine Learning: Out! Data Science: In!

Data science is a new interdisciplinary field of research that focuses on extracting value from data, integrating knowledge and methods from computer science, mathematics and statistics, and an application domain. Machine learning is the field created at the intersection of computer science and statistics, and it has many applications in data science when the application domain is taken into consideration. From a historical perspective, machine learning was considered, for the past 50 years or so, as part of artificial intelligence. It was taught mainly in computer science departments to scientists and engineers and the focus was placed, accordingly, on the mathematical and algorithmic aspects of machine learning, regardless of the application domain. Thus, although machine learning deals also with statistics, which focuses on data and does consider the application domain, up until recently, most machine learning activities took place in the context of computer science, where it began, and which focuses traditionally on algorithms.