Artificial intelligence is now powering a growing number of computing functions, and today the developer community today is getting another AI boost, courtesy of Yandex. Today, the Russian search giant — which, like its US counterpart Google, has extended into a myriad of other business lines, from mobile to maps and more — announced the launch of CatBoost, an open source machine learning library based on gradient boosting — the branch of ML that is specifically designed to help “teach” systems when you have a very sparse amount of data, and especially when the data may not all be sensorial (such as audio, text or imagery), but includes transactional or historical data, too.