Machine Learning algorithms have always been on the path towards evolution since its inception. Today the domain has come a long way from mathematical modelling to ensemble modelling and more. This evolution has seen more robust and SOTA models which is almost bridging the gap between potentials capabilities of human and AI. Ensemble modelling has given us one of those SOTA model XGBoost. Recently I happened to participate in a Machine Learning Hiring Challenge where the problem statement was a classification problem.

Implementing some of the pillars of an automated machine learning pipeline such as (i) Automated data preparation, (ii) Feature engineering, (iii) Model building in classification context that includes techniques such as (a) Regularised regression [1], (b) Logistic regression [2], (c) Random Forest [3], (d) Decision tree [4] and (e) Extreme Gradient Boosting (xgboost) [5], and finally, (iv) Model explanation (using lift chart and partial dependency plots). Also provides some additional features such as generating missing at random (MAR) variables and automated exploratory data analysis. Moreover, function exports the model results with the required plots in an HTML vignette report format that follows the best practices of the industry and the academia.

XGBoost is a popular Python library for gradient boosted decision trees. The implementation allows practitioners to distribute training across multiple compute instances (or workers), which is especially useful for large training sets. One tool used at Zalando for deploying production machine learning models is the managed service from Amazon called SageMaker. XGBoost is already included in SageMaker as a built-in algorithm, meaning that a prebuilt docker container is available. This container also supports distributed training, making it easy to scale training jobs across many instances.

The second layer is a logistic regression that uses these features as inputs. The code is derived from our 2nd place solution for a precisionFDA brain cancer machine learning challenge in 2020. To make sure the package is easy to understand, modify, and extend, we choose to build this package with base R without any special frameworks or dialects. We also only exposed the most essential tunable parameters for the boosted tree models (learning rate, maximum depth of a tree, and number of iterations).

In this guest post, you will learn by example how to do two popular machine learning techniques called random forest and extremely random forests. In fact, this post is an excerpt (adapted to the blog format) from the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence with Python – Second Edition: Your Complete Guide to Building Intelligent Apps using Python 3.x and TensorFlow 2. Now, before you will learn how to carry out random forests in Python with scikit-learn, you will find some brief information about the book. The new edition of this book, which will guide you to artificial intelligence with Python, is now updated to Python 3.x and TensorFlow 2. Furthermore, it has new chapters that, besides random forests, cover recurrent neural networks, artificial intelligence and Big Data, fundamental use cases, chatbots, and more. Finally, artificial Intelligence with Python – Second Edition is written by two experts in the field of artificial intelligence; Alberto Artasanches and Pratek Joshi (more information about the authors can be found towards the end of the post). Now, in the next section of this post, you will learn what random forests and extremely random forests are.

The Gradient Boosting Machine is a powerful ensemble machine learning algorithm that uses decision trees. Boosting is a general ensemble technique that involves sequentially adding models to the ensemble where subsequent models correct the performance of prior models. AdaBoost was the first algorithm to deliver on the promise of boosting. Gradient boosting is a generalization of AdaBoosting, improving the performance of the approach and introducing ideas from bootstrap aggregation to further improve the models, such as randomly sampling the samples and features when fitting ensemble members. Gradient boosting performs well, if not the best, on a wide range of tabular datasets, and versions of the algorithm like XGBoost and LightBoost often play an important role in winning machine learning competitions.

The Gradient Boosting Machine is a powerful ensemble machine learning algorithm that uses decision trees. Boosting is a general ensemble technique that involves sequentially adding models to the ensemble where subsequent models correct the performance of prior models. AdaBoost was the first algorithm to deliver on the promise of boosting. Gradient boosting is a generalization of AdaBoosting, improving the performance of the approach and introducing ideas from bootstrap aggregation to further improve the models, such as randomly sampling the samples and features when fitting ensemble members. Gradient boosting performs well, if not the best, on a wide range of tabular datasets, and versions of the algorithm like XGBoost and LightBoost often play an important role in winning machine learning competitions.

Standard methods of using categorical variables as predictors either endow them with an ordinal structure or assume they have no structure at all. However, categorical variables often possess structure that is more complicated than a linear ordering can capture. We develop a mathematical framework for representing the structure of categorical variables and show how to generalize decision trees to make use of this structure. This approach is applicable to methods such as Gradient Boosted Trees which use a decision tree as the underlying learner. We show results on weather data to demonstrate the improvement yielded by this approach.

In automated machine learning systems, concept drift in input data is one of the main challenges. It deteriorates model performance on new data over time. Previous research on concept drift mostly proposed model retraining after observing performance decreases. However, this approach is suboptimal because the system fixes the problem only after suffering from poor performance on new data. Here, we introduce an adversarial validation approach to concept drift problems in automated machine learning systems. With our approach, the system detects concept drift in new data before making inference, trains a model, and produces predictions adapted to the new data. We show that our approach addresses concept drift effectively with the AutoML3 Lifelong Machine Learning challenge data as well as in Uber's internal automated machine learning system, MaLTA.

Gradient boosting is a powerful ensemble machine learning algorithm. It's popular for structured predictive modeling problems, such as classification and regression on tabular data, and is often the main algorithm or one of the main algorithms used in winning solutions to machine learning competitions, like those on Kaggle. There are many implementations of gradient boosting available, including standard implementations in SciPy and efficient third-party libraries. Each uses a different interface and even different names for the algorithm. In this tutorial, you will discover how to use gradient boosting models for classification and regression in Python. Standardized code examples are provided for the four major implementations of gradient boosting in Python, ready for you to copy-paste and use in your own predictive modeling project.