Just add some "magic", e.g. per response analysis and inter-response rule-based system.

If you keep adding "magic" and doing careful research on what magic works and what doesn't, you end up roughly with the modern field of machine learning.

Random forests are a method that's often effective in taking into account many interactions among high dimensional data.

Expert Systems "magic" predates neural networks by decades, being predictable and giving validable results (unlike most ML models).