If you’re interested in how tree-based models work, I wrote an interactive explanation on decision trees here: https://mlu-explain.github.io/decision-tree/

and random forests here: https://mlu-explain.github.io/random-forest/

It’s also worth noting that a recentish paper shows neural networks can perform well on tabular data if well-regularized: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11189v1?utm_source=jesper&utm_med...