59. XGBoost: The Algorithm That Wins Competitions

If you've spent any time on Kaggle, you've seen XGBoost win. Over and over. Structured data competition? XGBoost. Tabular data problem? XGBoost. Real-world ML pipeline? XGBoost. It's not hype. It genuinely is that good on most problems with structured data. But a lot of people use it without underst