Scaling Laws for Classical Machine Learning on Tabular Data: A Benchmark Study

Abstract

Prior classical-ML learning-curve work fits power laws to tree, linear, and kernel models on tabular data, but at small scale: typically one curve, one team, a handful of cells. We present a distributed classroom-scale replication: 127 graduate students each ran a fixed protocol on 3 assigned datasets, drawn from 18 tabular classification and regression datasets and 6 model families (Boosting, Random Forest, SVM, Linear/Logistic, Ridge, Lasso), yielding 11,536 training runs and 1,648 fitted power-law curves of the form error(N) = a N^(-b) + c. Three findings. (1) Power laws fit: R^2 > 0.8 on 77.7% of cells, with tree ensembles dominating at full data (Boosting 50% of datasets, RandomForest 33%; linear models underperform on classification). (2) Approximate shared exponents within a model family: for 5 of 6 families, a single family-level exponent predicts each family's cross-dataset curves nearly as well as per-dataset exponents (R^2 gap < 0.011), though AIC favors the unconstrained fit and curve collapse is partial (32-58% of points within +/-0.5 dex). We frame this as approximate predictive compressibility, not dataset-independent universality; Lasso fails outright (negative control) and Ridge is fragile under leave-one-dataset-out. (3) Replicator-implementation variance: with random_state=42 fixed, independent re-implementations of the same protocol still differ by mean CV(b) = 0.144 on the fitted exponent -- not seed variance, but the spread induced by unconstrained parts of the protocol (preprocessing, encoding, missing-value handling). We release the aggregated curves, per-cell fits, and a practical data-requirement table for N* to reach target error 0.15.