An entirely different approach to statistics is presented by  formal learning theory. This is again a vast area of research, primarily located in computer science and artificial intelligence. The discipline is here mentioned briefly, as another example of an approach to statistics that avoids the choice of a statistical model altogether and merely identifies patterns in the data. We leave aside the theory of neural networks, which also concerns predictive systems that do not rely on a statistical model, and focus on the theory of learning algorithms because of all these approaches they have seen most philosophical attention.