[btrettel]

Nice quote. I'll have to read that paper later.

You can merge ML and theory in at least one way. I attended a talk by Prof. Karen Willcox of the University of Texas at Austin (I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering there) where she argued that in fluid dynamics and combustion at least, it's better to use "model order reduction" instead of machine learning. The problem with many models (e.g., Navier-Stokes equations) in these fields is that they are computationally expensive. Model order reduction looks for ways to reduce the computational cost of the model while maintaining accuracy, and it uses many of the same techniques as machine learning. Based on the examples she gave it seemed to be the closest thing I've seen to merge the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_order_reduction

http://kiwi.ices.utexas.edu/