On Gradient Boosted Decision Trees and Neural Rankers: A Case-Study on Short-Video Recommendations at ShareChat
Olivier Jeunen, Hitesh Sagtani, Himanshu Doi, Rasul Karimov, Neeti Pokharna, Danish Kalim, Aleksei Ustimenko, Christopher Green, Rishabh Mehrotra, Wenzhe Shi · 2023
Practitioners who wish to build real-world applications that rely on ranking models, need to decide which modelling paradigm to follow. This is not an easy choice to make, as the research literature on this topic has been shifting in recent years. In particular, whilst Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) have reigned supreme for more than a decade, the flexibility of neural networks has allowed them to catch up, and recent works report accuracy metrics that are on par. Nevertheless, practical systems require considerations beyond mere accuracy metrics to decide on a modelling approach.