Session abstract:
With all the hype about deep learning and "AI", it is not well publicized that for structured/tabular data widely encountered in business applications it is actually another machine learning algorithm, the gradient boosting machine (GBM) that most often achieves the highest accuracy in supervised learning tasks. In this talk we'll review some of the main GBM implementations available as R and Python packages such as xgboost, h2o, lightgbm etc, we'll discuss some of their main features and characteristics, and we'll see how tuning GBMs and creating ensembles of the best models can achieve the best prediction accuracy for many business problems.