A bad method spotted in a computer science / "big data" paper:
"We performed initial experiments with different machine learning algorithms and found that gradient tree boosting out-performed logistic regression, as well as other tree-based methods. Thus, all of our in-depth analysis is conducted with this algorithm."
Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook, 2013 Oct 24
No discussion is made for a theoretical reason the predictive performance of said techniques. Nope.
(A better approach would have been to provide a justification for the different techniques relative merits and followed with this as experimental confirmation.)