Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

By : Andrich van Wyk
3 (1)
Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

3 (1)
By: Andrich van Wyk

Overview of this book

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python is a comprehensive guide to learning the basics of machine learning and progressing to building scalable machine learning systems that are ready for release. This book will get you acquainted with the high-performance gradient-boosting LightGBM framework and show you how it can be used to solve various machine-learning problems to produce highly accurate, robust, and predictive solutions. Starting with simple machine learning models in scikit-learn, you’ll explore the intricacies of gradient boosting machines and LightGBM. You’ll be guided through various case studies to better understand the data science processes and learn how to practically apply your skills to real-world problems. As you progress, you’ll elevate your software engineering skills by learning how to build and integrate scalable machine-learning pipelines to process data, train models, and deploy them to serve secure APIs using Python tools such as FastAPI. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to use various -of-the-art tools that will help you build production-ready systems, including FLAML for AutoML, PostgresML for operating ML pipelines using Postgres, high-performance distributed training and serving via Dask, and creating and running models in the Cloud with AWS Sagemaker.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Gradient Boosting and LightGBM Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Practical Machine Learning with LightGBM
10
Part 3: Production-ready Machine Learning with LightGBM

Getting started with LightGBM in Python

LightGBM is implemented in C++ but has official C, R, and Python APIs. This section discusses the Python APIs that are available for working with LightGBM. LightGBM provides three Python APIs: the standard LightGBM API, the scikit-learn API (which is fully compatible with other scikit-learn functionality), and a Dask API for working with Dask. Dask is a parallel computing library discussed in Chapter 11, Distributed and GPU-Based Learning with LightGBM (https://www.dask.org/).

Throughout the rest of the book, we mainly use the scikit-learn API for LightGBM, but let’s first look at the standard Python API.

LightGBM Python API

The best way to dive into the Python API is with a hands-on example. The following are excerpts from a code listing that illustrates the use of the LightGBM Python API. The complete code example is available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Practical-Machine-Learning-with-LightGBM-and-Python/tree/main...