Very interesting. Tangentially - it surprised me how ubiquitous gradient boosting was in these competitions, since the algorithm was never mentioned in my stats

Very interesting. Tangentially - it surprised me how ubiquitous gradient boosting was in these competitions, since the algorithm was never mentioned in my stats/ML coursework. Especially seeing how well they perform. I'm particularly interested in your fourth point - uniquely valuable external datasets. I hadn't even thought about that being a factor.