RT Avi Chawla (@_avichawla)You're in an ML Engineer interview at Microsoft.The interviewer asks:"Why Boosting models primarily use Trees as the base learner?What's wrong with Linear regression or SVMs?"You: "Because linear models can’t fit non-linear data."Interview over.Here's what you missed:Texts describing boosting start with “weak learners” but then immediately pivot to trees.But this DOES NOT mean they can only work with trees.Consider a simple boosting algorithm:1) Train a tree model.2) Calculate the ...

You're in an ML Engineer interview at Microsoft.The interviewer asks:"Why Boosting models primarily use Trees as the base learner?What's wrong with Linear regression or SVMs?"You: "Because linear models can’t fit non-linear data."Interview over.Here's what you missed:Texts describing boosting start with “weak learners” but then immediately pivot to trees.But this DOES NOT mean they can only work with trees.Consider a simple boosting algorithm:1) Train a tree model.2) Calculate the left-over residual.3) Trai ...

Now when we're here, we're actually gonna try to think time with trees. Curious. I will actually take you to an island in Sweden's second largest lake to Visings where one can find the country's major oak forest.These trees were planted some 200 years ago and the idea was to have timbers for future warships. Eh, these trees were born at a time when oaks were becoming really scares in the country. And time went on and the trees were ready to harvest in 1975 and the head of the navy was approached with the of ...