Information retrieval (IR) vs data mining vs Machine Learning (ML)

Question

People often throw around the terms IR, ML, and data mining, but I have noticed a lot of overlap between them.

From people with experience in these fields, what exac

Answer 1

You can also add pattern recognition and (computational?) statistics as another couple of areas that overlap with the three you mentioned.

I'd say there is no well-defined line between them. What separates them is their history and their emphases. Statistics emphasizes mathematical rigor, data mining emphasizes scaling to large datasets, ML is somewhere in between.