Another Deceptive NN for Tabular Data -- The Wild, Unsubstantiated Claims about Constrained…

These days I get pinged almost every week, and often more frequently than that, about another paper that just came out claiming a new approach to Neural Networks for tabular data that, among other things, handily beats XGBoost. I've now come to consider this entire genre of ML "research" as tantamount to quackery, due to the really poor quality of considerations that go into most of the work in this category. So I usually don't even bother to check the claims. Nonetheless, there is this little voice in my head that goes something like "well Bojan, maybe you are overreacting, and maybe you are lettign your own biases get the best of you. Why don't you take a look and see what's going on." So this week I did exactly that.