English
Related papers

Related papers: When Do Neural Nets Outperform Boosted Trees on Ta…

200 papers

Tabular data remains one of the most prevalent data types across a wide range of real-world applications, yet effective representation learning for this domain poses unique challenges due to its irregular patterns, heterogeneous feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Weijieying Ren , Tianxiang Zhao , Yuqing Huang , Vasant Honavar

We present Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning (GBRL), a framework that adapts the strengths of gradient boosting trees (GBT) to reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. While neural networks (NNs) have become the de facto choice for RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Benjamin Fuhrer , Chen Tessler , Gal Dalal

Student dropout is a significant challenge in educational systems worldwide, leading to substantial social and economic costs. Predicting students at risk of dropout allows for timely interventions. While traditional Machine Learning (ML)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Pablo G. Almeida , Guilherme A. L. Silva , Valéria Santos , Gladston Moreira , Pedro Silva , Eduardo Luz

Class imbalance remains a significant challenge in machine learning, particularly for tabular data classification tasks. While Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) models have proven highly effective for such tasks, their performance can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Jiaqi Luo , Yuan Yuan , Shixin Xu

We focus on generative AI for a type of data that still represent one of the most prevalent form of data: tabular data. Our paper introduces two key contributions: a new powerful class of forest-based models fit for such tasks and a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Richard Nock , Mathieu Guillame-Bert

Despite the success of deep learning in computer vision and natural language processing, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree (GBDT) is yet one of the most powerful tools for applications with tabular data such as e-commerce and FinTech. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 ZhenZhe Ying , Zhuoer Xu , Zhifeng Li , Weiqiang Wang , Changhua Meng

Transfer learning has become the dominant paradigm for many natural language processing tasks. In addition to models being pretrained on large datasets, they can be further trained on intermediate (supervised) tasks that are similar to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Benjamin Minixhofer , Milan Gritta , Ignacio Iacobacci

This paper compares the performances of three supervised machine learning algorithms in terms of predictive ability and model interpretation on structured or tabular data. The algorithms considered were scikit-learn implementations of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-06 Alice J. Liu , Arpita Mukherjee , Linwei Hu , Jie Chen , Vijayan N. Nair

Recent advancements in tabular deep learning (DL) have led to substantial performance improvements, surpassing the capabilities of traditional models. With the adoption of techniques from natural language processing (NLP), such as language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Anton Frederik Thielmann , Soheila Samiee

While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) achieve spectacular results on unstructured data like images, there is still a gap on tabular data, data for which state of the art supervised learning still favours to a large extent decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Richard Nock , Mathieu Guillame-Bert

Relational databases, organized into tables connected by primary-foreign key relationships, are a common format for organizing data. Making predictions on relational data often involves transforming them into a flat tabular format through…

Databases · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Veronica Lachi , Antonio Longa , Beatrice Bevilacqua , Bruno Lepri , Andrea Passerini , Bruno Ribeiro

Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) is one of the most popular machine learning models in various applications. However, in the traditional settings, all data should be simultaneously accessed in the training procedure: it does not allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Huawei Lin , Jun Woo Chung , Yingjie Lao , Weijie Zhao

Foundation models are an emerging research direction in tabular deep learning. Notably, TabPFNv2 recently claimed superior performance over traditional GBDT-based methods on small-scale datasets using an in-context learning paradigm, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Ivan Rubachev , Akim Kotelnikov , Nikolay Kartashev , Artem Babenko

Gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) is a widely-used machine learning algorithm in both data analytic competitions and real-world industrial applications. Further, driven by the rapid increase in data volume, efforts have been made to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-06 Fangcheng Fu , Jiawei Jiang , Yingxia Shao , Bin Cui

Neural networks often struggle with high-dimensional but small sample-size tabular datasets. One reason is that current weight initialisation methods assume independence between weights, which can be problematic when there are insufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Andrei Margeloiu , Nikola Simidjievski , Pietro Lio , Mateja Jamnik

Data in tabular format is frequently occurring in real-world applications. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been extended to effectively handle such data, allowing feature interactions to be captured through representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Amr Alkhatib , Sofiane Ennadir , Henrik Boström , Michalis Vazirgiannis

In e-commerce recommender and search systems, tree-based models, such as LambdaMART, have set a strong baseline for Learning-to-Rank (LTR) tasks. Despite their effectiveness and widespread adoption in industry, the debate continues whether…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yunus Lutz , Timo Wilm , Philipp Duwe

Tabular neural network (NN) has attracted remarkable attentions and its recent advances have gradually narrowed the performance gap with respect to tree-based models on many public datasets. While the mainstreams focus on calibrating NN to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Xuan Li , Yun Wang , Bo Li

Tabular datasets are widely used in scientific disciplines such as biology. While these disciplines have already adopted AI methods to enhance their findings and analysis, they mainly use tree-based methods due to their interpretability. At…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Salvatore Raieli , Nathalie Jeanray , Stéphane Gerart , Sebastien Vachenc , Abdulrahman Altahhan

Tabular data remain a dominant form of real-world information but pose persistent challenges for deep learning due to heterogeneous feature types, lack of natural structure, and limited label-preserving augmentations. As a result, ensemble…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Sivan Sarafian , Yehudit Aperstein