Book Image

Hands-On Gradient Boosting with XGBoost and scikit-learn

By : Corey Wade
Book Image

Hands-On Gradient Boosting with XGBoost and scikit-learn

By: Corey Wade

Overview of this book

XGBoost is an industry-proven, open-source software library that provides a gradient boosting framework for scaling billions of data points quickly and efficiently. The book introduces machine learning and XGBoost in scikit-learn before building up to the theory behind gradient boosting. You’ll cover decision trees and analyze bagging in the machine learning context, learning hyperparameters that extend to XGBoost along the way. You’ll build gradient boosting models from scratch and extend gradient boosting to big data while recognizing speed limitations using timers. Details in XGBoost are explored with a focus on speed enhancements and deriving parameters mathematically. With the help of detailed case studies, you’ll practice building and fine-tuning XGBoost classifiers and regressors using scikit-learn and the original Python API. You'll leverage XGBoost hyperparameters to improve scores, correct missing values, scale imbalanced datasets, and fine-tune alternative base learners. Finally, you'll apply advanced XGBoost techniques like building non-correlated ensembles, stacking models, and preparing models for industry deployment using sparse matrices, customized transformers, and pipelines. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build high-performing machine learning models using XGBoost with minimal errors and maximum speed.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Bagging and Boosting
6
Section 2: XGBoost
10
Section 3: Advanced XGBoost

Exploring random forests

To get a better sense of how random forests work, let's build one using scikit-learn.

Random forest classifiers

Let's use a random forest classifier to predict whether a user makes more or less than USD 50,000 using the census dataset we cleaned and scored in Chapter 1, Machine Learning Landscape, and revisited in Chapter 2, Decision Trees in Depth. We are going to use cross_val_score to ensure that our test results generalize well:

The following steps build and score a random forest classifier using the census dataset:

  1. Import pandas, numpy, RandomForestClassifier, and cross_val_score before silencing warnings:

    import pandas as pd
    import numpy as np
    from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
    from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score
    import warnings
    warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
  2. Load the dataset census_cleaned.csv and split it into X (a predictor column) and y (a target column):

    df_census = pd.read_csv...