Kaggle Comp: Mercedes-Benz Greener Manufacturing ... How to improve a regression problem?

Xgboost is a gradient boosted tree(similar to a decision tree) ensembling algorithm that partitions data in a way that minimizes a loss function. Its not a neural network but the algorithm defines a loss function and optimizes it to solve a machine learning problem(like NNs).

https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/model.html