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Both good.

A bit easier to get into than neurips, icml, or iclr, and also seen as less prestigious. They're generally a good fit for less trendy ml topics.

I would submit to either depending on when the work was ready.

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Both are very competitive.

They're more theory focused imo, especially aistats

Comparing ICLR to AISTATS/UAI is like comparing apple to orange.

ICLR focuses on deep learning with more architecture stuffs, while AISTATS/UAI focuses more on statistical machine learning (e.g. kernel methods, Bayesian statistics, causal inference, optimization) with more theoretical results. I would argue that NeurIPS/ICML has a combination of both. NeurIPS seems to have more application papers in deep learning and architecture stuffs nowadays.

Thanks to the recent popularity in deep learning, ICLR quickly arises to the "Big 3" machine learning conference. This is just because deep learning has become a major part of machine learning nowadays.

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AISTATS tend to be more popular these days, probably due to the conference timing. If you don't want to submit to AAAI, AISTATS is the other option. Also, the review process is much less noisy due to the better focus, and you get 5 reviews in general. In terms of content, they have slightly different flavors. Traditionally, people doing Bayesian nonparametrics have favored UAI, and it still somewhat seems to be the case.

Do you think AISTATS is as prestigious as AAAI? The conference itself is much smaller, i.e., 3 days, single track. AISTATS does not even appear in CSRankings, while AAAI and ICLR do.

Depends on the area of focus. If you're a Bayesian machine learning, statistical learning, optimization person, AISTATS is the way to go. It's not just about prestige, it's just a better experience. The review is less noisy, the venue itself is more focused. It just feels like home. If you're more of an AI person than ML, than AAAI is probably more suited.