Gradient Boosting Internals Explained with Toy Examples
Gradient boosting has become the go-to algorithm for structured data problems, dominating Kaggle competitions and powering production systems at companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Netflix. Yet despite its ubiquity, many practitioners treat it as a black box—tuning hyperparameters without understanding what’s happening under the hood. This knowledge gap prevents effective debugging, thoughtful feature engineering, and … Read more