Range Against the Machine

A blog where a business analyst challenges AutoML using feature intuition, context-aware modeling, and domain reasoning - proving that sometimes, knowing your business domain matters more than brute force.

Range Against the Machine cover — Hand-coded beats one-click ML - sometimes.

Welcome

You’re not here for pipelines. You’re here for perspective.

This blog explores:

Real-world data quirks that confuse even the sharpest AutoML engines
Manual feature engineering backed by domain knowledge
The intersection of machine intelligence and human understanding
Business-driven modeling over leaderboard-chasing

If you’ve ever whispered “but that doesn’t make sense…” while staring at a SHAP plot, you’re in the right place.

Start with Case 1

The Model That Outsmarted AutoML
A PCA-driven rethinking of the Boston Housing classic.