In July 2017, another interesting GBM algorithm was made public by Yandex, the Russian search engine: it is CatBoost (https://catboost.yandex/), whose name comes from putting together the two words Category and Boosting. In fact, its strongest point is the capability of handling categorical variables, which actually make the most of information in most relational databases, by adopting a mixed strategy of one-hot-encoding and mean encoding (a way to express categorical levels by assigning them an appropriate numeric value for the problem at hand; more on that later).
As explained in the paper DOROGUSH, Anna Veronika; ERSHOV, Vasily; GULIN, Andrey. CatBoost: gradient boosting with categorical features support
(https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9a85/26132d3e05814dca7661b96b3f3208d676cc.pdf ...
