They definitely are as far as their roles at (most) startups are concerned.<p>Unless your startup's core strategy involves machine learning, statistics tends to come handier than machine learning in the early days. Most likely, what moves your company is not a data product built atop machine learning models but the ability to draw less wrong conclusions from your data, which is the very definition of statistics. Also, in the early days of a startup, you experience small/missing data problems: You have very few customers, very incomplete datasets with a lot of gotchas. Interpreting such bad data is no small feat, but it's definitely different from training your Random Forest model against millions of observations.
LeCun has a comment on this paper here: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10153293764562143" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10153293764562143</a>
Here is a link to the paper referenced in the beginning: <a href="http://courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataScience.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataSci...</a><p>Great read for anyone interested in the debate.
I think they will eventually converge.<p>Probabilistic programming is already a hint of this. The most general class of probability distributions is that of non-deterministic programs. ML is just a quick and dirty way to write these programs.
What is commonly understood as 'statistics' is just a specialized subset of machine learning. Machine learning generalizes statistics.<p>The correct complement to machine learning is cryptography -- trying to intentionally build things that are provably intractable to reverse engineer.
I think feasibility to get an explanation for the results of modern machine learning is wishful thinking. I personally cannot explain my gut feelings. So why should we expect an explanation when machine deals with the same class of problems?<p>Besides, it is easy to get wrong explanation and, as Vladimir Vapnik in his 3 metaphors for complex world observed, <a href="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/esqn/windsor04/handouts/vapnik.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/esqn/windsor04/handouts/vap...</a> , "actions based on your understanding of God’s thoughts can bring you to catastrophe".