r/statistics • u/GayTwink-69 • 10d ago

Career Mathematical Statistics VS Computational Statistics/Machine Learning for an academic careeer [C] [R}

Is it still worth pursuing an academic career in mathematical statistics these days?
Or is it shooting yourself in the foot with all the focus on computational statistics and machine learning?

I.e., will you have a harder time landing postdocs/tenure track positions and getting grants as a more mathematical statistician vs a computational statistician/machine learning scientist?

I love mathematical statistics and proving everything rigorously using mathematics, but I also don't want to be shooting myself in the foot by choosing a dead/dying path.

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u/CognitioMortis 8d ago

ML was the big thing one or few paradigms ago. now it's "AI". Every state, every government buraeu , every private sector, etc wants to do "AI" so that's where funding is going.

The guy publishing "research" on how a clanker performs on some random task is getting all the money while the the people doing "traditional ML" and statistics are fighting for scraps.