It may depend &quot;with whom you talk&quot;, but I have impression of three cultures:<p>- statisticians (frequentist statistics, bayesian statistics; trying to find an underlying probabilistic model, even if at cost of underfitting)<p>- computer scientists (algorithms; ad-hoc methodology with goal of predicting data as well as possible)<p>- physicists (physics-motivated tools, relatively clean and composable mathematics; trying to get some properties of phenomena, even if at cost of cherry-picking &quot;spheres in the vacuum&quot;)