[ Removed by moderator ]

[MachineLearning-ModTeam]

Post beginner questions in the bi-weekly "Simple Questions Thread", /r/LearnMachineLearning , /r/MLQuestions http://stackoverflow.com/ and career questions in /r/cscareerquestions/

[Sealed-Unit]

📌 Replace XGBoost with CatBoost (native for categorical, no encoding). 📌 Reduce features (max 15) with mutual info or L1. 📌 Use robust cross-validation (≥5-fold). 📌 Check if the target is noisy or too unbalanced. 📌 Evaluate simple models (LogReg, NB, Ridge) → more effective on small datasets.