Deep learning & XgBoost : Winning it hands down !

Earlier it was Random forest, the go-to algorithm for classification problems in most of the data science competitions. Correctly formulated problem, with smart feature engineering and minimal tuning of the RF algorithm ( ntree, mtry) using grid search could get you past the bulk of the crowd . Then came Xgboost and it soon became the hot favorite. It isn't very tough to say Deep learning is running the show at the moment. Although, GPU powered deep learning frameworks, weren't accessible to everyone .