Machine Learning Future

Interview with machine learning expert David Blei.  " ... I think that one of the next breakthroughs in modern machine learning and statistics will involve observational data. Previously, machine learning has focused on prediction; observational data has been difficult to understand and the activity of exploring data was a fuzzily defined activity. Now, data sets are much larger ("big data") and practitioners need to be able to quickly explore, understand, visualize, and summarize them. Revisiting observational data in the context of larger data sets (and the new pressing need) will lead to new methods and new theory around what we can say about observational data. ... "