Comparing Deep Neural Networks and Gradient Boosting for Pneumonia Detection Using Chest X-Rays

In recent years, with the development of computational power and the explosion of data available for analysis, deep neural networks, particularly convolutional neural networks, have emerged as one of the default models for image classification, outperforming most of the classical machine learning models in this task. On the other hand, gradient boosting, a classical model, has been widely used for tabular structure data and leading data competitions, such as those from Kaggle. In this study, the authors compare the performance of deep neural networks with gradient boosting models for detecting pneumonia using chest x-rays. The authors implement several popular architectures of deep neural networks, such as Resnet50, InceptionV3, Xception, and MobileNetV3, and variants of a gradient boosting model. The authors then evaluate these two classes of models in terms of prediction accuracy. The computation in this study is done using cloud computing services offered by Google Colab Pro.