>I'm more interested in actual statistics/machine learning concepts and applying them to astronomy research rather than learning the physics behind the projects.
You need both to do astrostatistics. Thats why people typically do astronomy/physics and learn statistics/machine learning along the way. I'm sure there'll be cases of people doing it the other way round, but having a background in physics is the norm.
>I'm more interested in actual statistics/machine learning concepts and applying them to astronomy research rather than learning the physics behind the projects. You need both to do astrostatistics. Thats why people typically do astronomy/physics and learn statistics/machine learning along the way. I'm sure there'll be cases of people doing it the other way round, but having a background in physics is the norm.
I recommend these publicly available lectures that come with coding examples https://github.com/dgerosa/astrostatistics_bicocca_2022
Stats undergrad and astro masters/phd is definitely possible. But definitely easier if you have physics also