Chris MacNeel: Hey, I’m Chris at Freya Systems, and I’d like to talk about machine learning and statistics.

A lot of times we get asked, “What machine learning models are you using? What’s the best thing out there. What’s the cutting edge technology that you’re using.” And they often forget about statistical models. Now, it’s not as sexy, as very traditional and very staunch mathematical, but we like using statistical models when the opportunity presents itself. Sometimes we’ll find that the data just isn’t clean enough or we don’t have enough parameters or there’s just not enough data, and that’s where we find that statistical models sometimes supersede machine learning. It all depends on what the customer is looking for, how much time you have and what the budget is.

So there you go, machine learning versus statistics.