Do you know the basics of supervised learning and want to learn to use state-of-the-art models on real-world datasets? Gradient boosting is currently one of the most popular techniques for efficient modeling of tabular datasets of all sizes. XGboost is a very fast, scalable implementation of gradient boosting that has taken data science by storm, with models using XGBoost regularly winning many online data science competitions and used at scale across different industries. In this course, you'll learn how to use this powerful library alongside pandas and scikit-learn to build and tune supervised learning models. You'll work with real-world datasets to solve classification as well as regression problems.

Recent studies have shown that tuning prediction models increases prediction accuracy and that Random Forest can be used to construct prediction intervals. However, to our best knowledge, no study has investigated the need to, and the manner in which one can, tune Random Forest for optimizing prediction intervals { this paper aims to fill this gap. We explore a tuning approach that combines an effectively exhaustive search with a validation technique on a single Random Forest parameter. This paper investigates which, out of eight validation techniques, are beneficial for tuning, i.e., which automatically choose a Random Forest configuration constructing prediction intervals that are reliable and with a smaller width than the default configuration. Additionally, we present and validate three meta-validation techniques to determine which are beneficial, i.e., those which automatically chose a beneficial validation technique. This study uses data from our industrial partner (Keymind Inc.) and the Tukutuku Research Project, related to post-release defect prediction and Web application effort estimation, respectively. Results from our study indicate that: i) the default configuration is frequently unreliable, ii) most of the validation techniques, including previously successfully adopted ones such as 50/50 holdout and bootstrap, are counterproductive in most of the cases, and iii) the 75/25 holdout meta-validation technique is always beneficial; i.e., it avoids the likely counterproductive effects of validation techniques.

Tensorflow 1.4 was released a few weeks ago with an implementation of Gradient Boosting, called TensorFlow Boosted Trees (TFBT). Unfortunately, the paper does not have any benchmarks, so I ran some against XGBoost. For many Kaggle-style data mining problems, XGBoost has been the go-to solution since its release in 2006. It's probably as close to an out-of-the-box machine learning algorithm as you can get today, as it gracefully handles un-normalized or missing data, while being accurate and fast to train. The code to reproduce the results in this article is on GitHub.

XGBoost is a library for developing very fast and accurate gradient boosting models. It is a library at the center of many winning solutions in Kaggle data science competitions. In this tutorial, you will discover how to install the XGBoost library for Python on macOS. How to Install XGBoost for Python on macOS Photo by auntjojo, some rights reserved. Note: I have used this procedure for years on a range of different macOS versions and it has not changed.

The accuracy of a predictive model can be boosted in two ways: Either by embracing feature engineering or by applying boosting algorithms straight away. Having participated in lots of data science competition, I've noticed that people prefer to work with boosting algorithms as it takes less time and produces similar results. There are multiple boosting algorithms like Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, AdaBoost, Gentle Boost etc. Every algorithm has its own underlying mathematics and a slight variation is observed while applying them. If you are new to this, Great! You shall be learning all these concepts in a week's time from now.

Tensorflow 1.4 was released a few weeks ago with an implementation of Gradient Boosting, called TensorFlow Boosted Trees (TFBT). Unfortunately, the paper does not have any benchmarks, so I ran some against XGBoost. For many Kaggle-style data mining problems, XGBoost has been the go-to solution since its release in 2006. It's probably as close to an out-of-the-box machine learning algorithm as you can get today, as it gracefully handles un-normalized or missing data, while being accurate and fast to train. The code to reproduce the results in this article is on GitHub.

SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) explains the output of any machine learning model using expectations and Shapley values. SHAP unifies aspects of several previous methods [1-7] and represents the only possible consistent and locally accurate additive feature attribution method based on expectations (see SHAP paper for details). While SHAP values can explain the output of any machine learning model, we have developed a high-speed exact algorithm for ensemble tree methods (Tree SHAP paper). The above explanation shows features each contributing to push the model output from the base value (the average model output over the training dataset we passed) to the model output. Features pushing the prediction higher are shown in red, those pushing the prediction lower are in blue.

We explore the use of random forest and gradient boosting, two powerful tree-based machine learning algorithms, for the detection of cosmic strings in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), through their unique Gott-Kaiser-Stebbins effect on the temperature anisotropies.The information in the maps is compressed into feature vectors before being passed to the learning units. The feature vectors contain various statistical measures of processed CMB maps that boost the cosmic string detectability. Our proposed classifiers, after training, give results improved over or similar to the claimed detectability levels of the existing methods for string tension, $G\mu$. They can make $3\sigma$ detection of strings with $G\mu \gtrsim 2.1\times 10^{-10}$ for noise-free, $0.9'$-resolution CMB observations. The minimum detectable tension increases to $G\mu \gtrsim 3.0\times 10^{-8}$ for a more realistic, CMB S4-like (II) strategy, still a significant improvement over the previous results.

I have included Python code in this article where it is most instructive. Full code and data to follow along can be found on the project Github page. The best way to think about hyperparameters is like the settings of an algorithm that can be adjusted to optimize performance, just as we might turn the knobs of an AM radio to get a clear signal (or your parents might have!). While model parameters are learned during training -- such as the slope and intercept in a linear regression -- hyperparameters must be set by the data scientist before training. In the case of a random forest, hyperparameters include the number of decision trees in the forest and the number of features considered by each tree when splitting a node.

Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) is a popular machine learning algorithm, and has quite a few effective implementations such as XGBoost and pGBRT. Although many engineering optimizations have been adopted in these implementations, the efficiency and scalability are still unsatisfactory when the feature dimension is high and data size is large. A major reason is that for each feature, they need to scan all the data instances to estimate the information gain of all possible split points, which is very time consuming. To tackle this problem, we propose two novel techniques: \emph{Gradient-based One-Side Sampling} (GOSS) and \emph{Exclusive Feature Bundling} (EFB). With GOSS, we exclude a significant proportion of data instances with small gradients, and only use the rest to estimate the information gain. We prove that, since the data instances with larger gradients play a more important role in the computation of information gain, GOSS can obtain quite accurate estimation of the information gain with a much smaller data size. With EFB, we bundle mutually exclusive features (i.e., they rarely take nonzero values simultaneously), to reduce the number of features. We prove that finding the optimal bundling of exclusive features is NP-hard, but a greedy algorithm can achieve quite good approximation ratio (and thus can effectively reduce the number of features without hurting the accuracy of split point determination by much). We call our new GBDT implementation with GOSS and EFB \emph{LightGBM}. Our experiments on multiple public datasets show that, LightGBM speeds up the training process of conventional GBDT by up to over 20 times while achieving almost the same accuracy.