If the object is only to improve performance, a black-box machine-learning model should outperform a hand-tuned algorithm. The generalisation (out-of-sample) pe

If the object is only to improve performance, a black-box machine-learning model should outperform a hand-tuned algorithm. The generalisation (out-of-sample) performance will depend on how representative the training and evaluation sets are, but this is also true for an algorihtm with human-selected features.