Tale of Two Cultures! Statistical Modeling and Machine Learning

Statistics emphasizes inference, whereas machine learning emphasizes prediction. There has been lot of debates on this topic and there are strong sentiments in both the camps. The intent of this article is not to add more fuel to the fire or to side with one camp or the other, but to share some high level views so that the budding data scientists get a clear perspective. First thing is you need data, whether lots of data or samples of data is not the interesting question. The interesting question is, what approaches you would take to analyze the data to solve a problem.