I tried fitting a model with only “Strength diff plus 8 times sign(speed diff)” as an explanatory variable, got (impressively, only moderately!) worse results. My best guess is that your model is underfitting, and over-attaching to the (good!) approximation you fed it, because it doesn’t have enough Total Learning to do anything better . . . in which case you might see different outcomes if you increased your number of trees and/or your learning rate.
You may well be right, I’ll look into my hyperparameters. I looked at the code Claude had generated with my interference and that greatly lowered my confidence in them, lol (see edit to this comment).
I tried fitting a model with only “Strength diff plus 8 times sign(speed diff)” as an explanatory variable, got (impressively, only moderately!) worse results. My best guess is that your model is underfitting, and over-attaching to the (good!) approximation you fed it, because it doesn’t have enough Total Learning to do anything better . . . in which case you might see different outcomes if you increased your number of trees and/or your learning rate.
Alternatively
I might just have screwed up my code somehow.
Still . . .
I’m sticking with my choices for now.
You may well be right, I’ll look into my hyperparameters. I looked at the code Claude had generated with my interference and that greatly lowered my confidence in them, lol (see edit to this comment).