XGBoost workshop and meetup talk with Tianqi Chen Data Science Los Angeles

Proof of this and also because XGBoost has an easy-to-use interface from both R and Python, XGBoost has become a favorite tool in Kaggle competitions. Besides feature engineering, cross-validation and ensembling, XGBoost is a key ingredient for achieving the highest accuracy in many data science competitions and more importantly in practical applications. We were fortunate to recently host Tianqi Chen, the main author of XGBoost in a workshop and a meetup talk in Santa Monica, California. First, we started with an advanced workshop in the afternoon for which anyone could apply to participate but there were only a dozen spots available (which got us some expert users of XGBoost, but unfortunately we had to reject some good people too, sorry). This advanced workshop had 2 sessions.