Agreed. AFAIK, only statistics has addressed the question of info sufficiency in data and discriminative power of method. Personally, I think the former is an enormously important subject that isn't addressed well in most ML texts. How much data is necessary to answer a given question in practice? How do you know if your data or method are "good enough"?
From what I've seen, statistics addresses these questions better than CS-taught ML does. CS-based ML is no different from algorithm analysis; it suffers from sensitivity to limits inherent in the data. But ML courses often don't address these limits very rigorously. Yet knowing those limits is all important when effectively mining information at a professional level.
If you can't tell the decision maker what you know and what you don't, your inference/prediction really isn't useful. From what I've seen, statistics addresses this best.
From what I've seen, statistics addresses these questions better than CS-taught ML does. CS-based ML is no different from algorithm analysis; it suffers from sensitivity to limits inherent in the data. But ML courses often don't address these limits very rigorously. Yet knowing those limits is all important when effectively mining information at a professional level.
If you can't tell the decision maker what you know and what you don't, your inference/prediction really isn't useful. From what I've seen, statistics addresses this best.