What's so special about CatBoost?

CatBoost is based on gradient boosting. A new machine learning technique developed by Yandex that outperforms many existing boosting algorithms like XGBoost, Light GBM. While deep learning algorithms requires lots of data and computational power, boosting algorithms are still in need for most of the business problems. However boosting algorithms like XGBoost takes hours to train and sometimes you'll get frustrated while tuning hyper-parameters. On the other hand, CatBoost is easy to implement and very powerful.