Leo Breiman's 2001 classic "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" still resonates
miniapeur · x · 2026-10-25
A thread resurfaces Leo Breiman's 2001 paper "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" — Breiman invented random forests and created bagging.
The paper argues statistics has two cultures: one assumes data arise from a given stochastic model, the other uses algorithmic models treating the mechanism as unknown. Statistics' near-exclusive commitment to data models led to irrelevant theory and questionable conclusions, while algorithmic modeling thrived outside the field. Over two decades later, the arguments remain strikingly relevant to the statistics–ML relationship.
More from Research
- State of AI Report 2026: the frontier is now a three-lab race between Anthropic, OpenAI and Google — nathanbenaich · 2026-10-25
- Benchmarks should penalize misalignment, not ambiguity — environment fidelity over prompt over-specification — nirmal_dist · 2026-10-25
- Math is the fastest-growing field on arXiv, at 2x the expected trend — IgorCarron · 2026-10-25
- Nine checkable math puzzles from human to ASI level; Grok passed solved ones but mistook a float estimate for a proof — jarekduda · 2026-10-25
- UIUC's FAS benchmark trains LLMs to predict future research directions, +10.6% FAS — shangbinfeng · 2026-10-25
- Git pushes quadruple to 320M per quarter as vulnerability counts lag — LLMs said to boost code security — max_paperclips · 2026-10-25