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Tuesday, September 22, 2020

All about XGBoost

XGBoost is an open source library that provides high-performance gradient-boosted decision trees implementation. An underlying C++ code base combined with a top-sitting Python interface makes the package extremely powerful and easy to implement. Gradient Boosting is a method in which new models are equipped to predict prior model residuals (i.e. errors).


Tianqi Chen, one of the co-creators of XGBoost, announced (in 2016) that the innovative system features and algorithmic optimizations in XGBoost have rendered it 10 times faster than most sought after machine learning solutions. A truly amazing technique!

Did you know CERN recognized it as the best approach to classify signals from the Large Hadron Collider.




  • XGBoost is an ensemble learning method. 
  • Ensemble learning is a systematic solution to combine the predictive power of multiple learners.
  • The resultant is a single model which gives the aggregated output from several models.
  • The models that form the ensemble, also known as base learners, could be either from the same learning algorithm or different learning algorithms. 
  • Bagging and boosting are two widely used ensemble learners. 
  • Though these two techniques can be used with several statistical models, the most predominant usage has been with decision trees.

Bagging:

Bootstrap aggregating, also called bagging, is a machine learning ensemble meta-algorithm designed to improve the stability and accuracy of machine learning algorithms used in statistical classification and regression. 
It reduces variance and helps to avoid overfitting.

Boosting:

  • In boosting, the trees are built sequentially such that each subsequent tree aims to reduce the errors of the previous tree. 
  • Each tree learns from its predecessors and updates the residual errors.
  • Hence, the tree that grows next in the sequence will learn from an updated version of the residuals.
  • The base learners in boosting are weak learners in which the bias is high, and the predictive power is just a tad better than random guessing. 
  • Each of these weak learners contributes some vital information for prediction, enabling the boosting technique to produce a strong learner by effectively combining these weak learners.
  • The final strong learner brings down both the bias and the variance.






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