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 understanding why it works. They just copy the code, tune a few numbers, and hope for the best. This post fixes that. What You'll Learn Here The difference between bagging and boosting How gradient boosting