🚀 Mastering CatBoost: The Hidden Gem of Tabular AI (Early Release Preorder)

📘 Mastering CatBoost: The Hidden Gem of Tabular AI (Early Access)

A definitive, production-grade guide to CatBoost — one of the most powerful yet underused tools in modern machine learning.

🛒 Pre-Order Details

Incremental chapter release
Chapters are released progressively. As new material is added, both the value and the price increase over time.

Lifetime updates included
By pre-ordering, you receive all current and future updates for the book at no additional cost.

By Valeriy Manokhin, PhD, MBA, CQF

“CatBoost is not just underrated — it is objectively better.”
This book explains why, with the science, benchmarks, and production-grade code to prove it.

💸 Pricing

This book is in active development and offered under early-access pricing.

• Early readers lock in lifetime access to all future updates
• The price will increase as content expands and the book approaches completion

If you find value in the work — or want to support its continued development — you’re welcome to contribute what it’s worth to you ❤️

🧠 Why CatBoost?

There is now a substantial body of empirical evidence showing that CatBoost consistently and significantly outperforms XGBoost and LightGBM on real-world tabular data — often by large margins, as demonstrated in large-scale benchmarks such as TabArena.

CatBoost is:

• faster at inference,
• easier to tune,
• and designed from the ground up for categorical features — without leakage-prone preprocessing hacks.

Despite this, CatBoost remains one of the most underused tools in machine learning.

This book fixes that.

Built on:

• 🧪 Scientific benchmarks and peer-reviewed research
• 📈 Production experience and real-world pipelines
• 🔬 Direct links to the open-source ecosystem (including Awesome CatBoost)

🔍 What You’ll Learn

• Core architecture — how CatBoost works under the hood
• Hands-on modeling — end-to-end tabular ML pipelines
• Categorical encoding — no label encoding or one-hot hacks
• Overfitting detection — native, automated safeguards
• Evaluation strategies — cross-validation the CatBoost way
• Interpretability — SHAP, feature importance, monotonic constraints
• Bonus: Time series with CatBoost, plus quantile & uncertainty modeling

📘 Scope & Depth — More Than “Just Boosting”

Mastering CatBoost covers far more than standard classification use cases:

• Classification, regression, ranking, time series, and quantile / uncertainty models
• Deep treatment of categorical feature handling — CatBoost’s core advantage
• Native overfitting detection, monotonic constraints, and interpretability tools
• Everything tuned specifically for real-world tabular workflows

🏗️ Under-the-Hood Architecture & Scientific Advantages

Many resources provide intuition and tuning advice.

This book goes deeper.

You’ll understand:

• Ordered boosting, symmetric trees, and smoothed target statistics
• Why CatBoost handles categorical variables without information leakage
• Why scientific benchmarks repeatedly show CatBoost outperforming XGBoost and LightGBM on real datasets
• Modern capabilities such as GPU training, quantization, and ONNX export

🧩 Interpretability & Safeguards

• Native overfitting detection — no guesswork
• Built-in feature importance, interactions, and partial dependence
• Monotonic constraints tuned specifically for CatBoost internals

🎯 The Verdict

Mastering CatBoost goes far beyond alternatives in:

• Technical depth (architecture + categorical handling)
• Applied scope (classification, regression, ranking, forecasting)
• Deployment readiness (quantization, ONNX, production pipelines)
• Support materials (repositories, notebooks, domain-specific chapters)

👨‍💻 Who This Book Is For

This book is designed for:

• Machine learning engineers working with tabular data
• Data scientists tired of fragile pipelines and endless tuning
• Students or researchers who have hit limits with XGBoost or sklearn
• Practitioners who want to move fast from data to insight

If you value speed, robustness, and real performance, this book is for you.

📦 What You Get

📥 Instant access — start reading immediately
🔄 Free lifetime updates — new chapters, fixes, and bonus content
💬 Private Discord access — discussions, materials, early bonuses, live events

🔓 Pro Edition Bonus Pack (Early Access)

Includes everything above, plus:

• ✅ Premium templates — plug-and-play workflows
• ✅ Extended case studies — deep analyses across major industries
• ✅ Cheat sheets & flashcards — quick-reference guides
• ✅ Behind-the-scenes notebooks — annotated exploratory pipelines
• ✅ Tabular model selection toolkit — benchmarking and optimisation notebooks

Designed for professionals and teams who want to deploy faster and with confidence.

⚠️ Pro Edition pricing will increase as bonus content expands and the book reaches completion.

✍️ About the Author

Written by Valeriy Manokhin, PhD, MBA, CQF — a forecasting expert, data scientist, and machine learning researcher with publications in top peer-reviewed journals.

Valeriy has advised startups and large enterprises, helping them build and rebuild forecasting and ML systems at scale. He has led successful initiatives for global organisations, winning competitive tenders against multinational consultancies and specialised AI vendors.

His methods have delivered multimillion-dollar business impact, and his training programs have reached professionals in 40+ countries.
His books are now used in 100+ countries and have ranked #1 in Machine Learning, Forecasting, and Time Series across major platforms.

🌍 Trusted By and Taught To

Professionals at:
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Nike, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Target, NTT Data, Mars Inc., Lidl, Publicis Sapient, and more.

Researchers and academics from:
University of Chicago, KTH (Sweden), UBC (Canada), DTU (Denmark), and other world-class institutions.

Students include:
VPs of Engineering, AI Leads, Principal & Lead Data Scientists, ML Engineers, Consultants, Professors, Founders, Researchers, and PhD students.

📚 Also by the Author

Mastering Modern Time Series Forecasting
A production-grade guide trusted by data science leaders in 100+ countries.
Learn more → Mastering Modern Time Series Forecasting

⚡ Ready to master the strongest tabular model in machine learning?

CatBoost isn’t just another gradient booster.
It’s one of the most underappreciated breakthroughs in ML — and you’re about to master it.

👉 Get started now and build faster, stronger tabular models with confidence.