data science competition winners 17 out of 29 winning solutions in kaggle last year used XGBoost Solve wide range of problems: store sales prediction; high energy physics event classification; web text classification; customer behavior prediction; motion detection; ad click through rate prediction; malware classification; product categorization; hazard risk prediction; massive online course dropout rate prediction Many of the problems used data from sensors Present and Future of KDDCup. Ron Bekkerman (KDDCup 2015 chair): “Something dramatic happened in Machine Learning over the past couple of years. It is called XGBoost – a package implementing Gradient Boosted Decision Trees that works wonders in data classification. Apparently, every winning team used XGBoost, mostly in ensembles with other classifiers. Most surprisingly, the winning teams report very minor improvements that ensembles bring over a single well- configured XGBoost..”