What's machine learning? It depends on who you ask

Data scientists are professionals who use the most appropriate tools and methodologies to get their jobs done. The best data scientists avail themselves of the complete set of knowledge- and pattern-discovery approaches that involve statistical analysis. How should we refer to the sum total of data science techniques? Often, they are lumped under the term "advanced analytics." This phrase is deliberately vague in that it is intended as a catch-all for everything from statistical analysis and data mining to predictive modeling, natural language processing, support vector machines, and so on.