Indeed, why should we confine
ourselves to the statistical framework?
In their 1974 book, similar (however
somewhat rhetorical) doubts were expressed
by two of the present leaders in the field of statistical pattern recognition, Vapnik and Chervonenkis:
In those days it appeared that the
pattern recognition problem carried
within itself the beginnings of some new idea, which is in
no way based on the system of old
concepts; researchers wanted to
find new formulations, not to reduce
the problem to already known
mathematical schemes. In this sense the reduction of the
pattern
recognition problem to the scheme of
average risk minimization
rouses some disappointment. True, there are attempts to understand the problem in a more complex formulation . . . . As yet, however, such
attempts are extremely rare.