The Tabular Truth

Deep learning earned its crown on structured media — images, audio, text — where patterns are spatial or sequential and scale keeps paying dividends.

Business data isn't like that. Fraud scores, churn models, credit default, lead scoring: rows and columns of mixed types, no smooth structure to exploit, often only thousands of rows. On this terrain — and on the leaderboards of tabular Kaggle competitions — gradient-boosted trees win disproportionately.