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Comment by shoyer | Hacker News Reader

This article in Nature, which the Popular Mechanics article appears to be based on, is much more informative: http://www.nature.com/news/germany-enlists-machine-learning-...

It's a little misleading to say they're using AI. Most of this work (and all the specific examples listed on the project webpage) is more appropriately called statistics.

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Nowadays there's no clear difference between statistics and machine learning. But the latter gets you more grant money. :-/

Machine learning is setting it up to find the correlations for you these days :p It is annoying when people choose things due to a more exciting name/buzzword rather than actual merit...

> no clear difference between statistics and machine learning

Yes, there is. When your model has thousands/millions of parameters, or when your model has many more parameters than the number of examples in your training set, it's called Machine Learning.

Technically you call overfitting AI...

That's not true. Linear and logistic regression are like the first things you learn in a machine learning class. Many popular ML models do not have millions of parameters, including decision trees and shallow neural networks.

Thanks, we updated the link from http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a2..., which does point to this.

Popular Mechanics has become nothing but vapid clickbait nonsense these days. Thanks for the source.

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