"Facially" in the sense of "on the face of it", roughly as a synonym for "obviously", seems like a pretty standard usage to me—this is certainly not the first place I've seen the word used in this sense.
Human recall failure. Probably wanted "seemingly", "apparently", or even "ostensibly", but who's got time for all that when the publish button's right there.
> Also, ML code tends to vastly more complex and less standardized than traditional statistical modeling.
I mean, hey, it's proof that the text isn't AI generated, since ChatGPT is better at English than that, but it makes it hard to read and I'm not going to buy their book if it's going to be full of errors like that.