  In the detailed probe of Higgs boson properties at the Large Hadron Collider,
and in looking for new physics signatures in the electroweak symmetry breaking
sector, the bottom quark Yukawa coupling has a crucial role. We investigate
possible departure from the standard model value of $b\bar{b}h$ coupling,
phenomenologically expressed in terms of a modification factor $\alpha_b$, in
$b\bar{b}$-associated production of the $125$-GeV scalar at the high-luminosity
LHC. In a next-to-leading order estimate, we make use of a gradient boosting
algorithm to improve in statistical significance upon a cut-based analysis. It
is found possible to probe down to $\alpha_b = 3$ with more than $5~\sigma$
significance, with ${\cal L} = 3000$ fb$^{-1}$ and $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV, while
the achievable limit at $95\%$ C.L. is $\pm 1.95$.
