What was the author's rationale for choosing XGBoost? Failure analysis is an old field so I'm very surprised that there's not even a cursory nod to the exponent

What was the author's rationale for choosing XGBoost? Failure analysis is an old field so I'm very surprised that there's not even a cursory nod to the exponentially distributed failure times that most failure models use. If anything, this post just spends a lot more time than usual talking about data cleanup.