Trees and Ensembles — Why Gradient Boosting Still Wins on Tabular Data
If you have a spreadsheet and a prediction to make, the state of the art is probably not a neural network — it's a gradient-boosted ensemble of decision trees. Decision trees are intuitive, handle messy real-world data gracefully, and when combined into ensembles become the most consistently winning approach to tabular machine learning. This post builds from a single tree to the ensembles that quietly power a huge fraction of production ML.
If you have a spreadsheet and a prediction to make, the state of the art is probably not a neural network — it's a gradient-boosted ensemble of trees. From a single decision tree to random forests and boosting, and the useful heuristic: tabular → trees, unstructured → deep learning.