This chapter will introduce you to the fundamental idea behind XGBoost—boosted learners. Once you understand how XGBoost works, you'll apply it to solve a common classification problem found in industry: predicting whether a customer will stop being a customer at some point in the future.

Welcome to the course!

Which of these is a classification problem?

Which of these is a binary classification problem?

Introducing XGBoost

XGBoost: Fit/Predict

What is a decision tree?

Decision trees

What is Boosting?

Measuring accuracy

Measuring AUC

When should I use XGBoost?

Using XGBoost

Classification with XGBoost

After a brief review of supervised regression, you'll apply XGBoost to the regression task of predicting house prices in Ames, Iowa. You'll learn about the two kinds of base learners that XGboost can use as its weak learners, and review how to evaluate the quality of your regression models.

Regression review

Which of these is a regression problem?

Objective (loss) functions and base learners

Decision trees as base learners

Linear base learners

Evaluating model quality

Regularization and base learners in XGBoost

Using regularization in XGBoost

Visualizing individual XGBoost trees

Visualizing feature importances: What features are most important in my dataset

Regression with XGBoost

This chapter will teach you how to make your XGBoost models as performant as possible. You'll learn about the variety of parameters that can be adjusted to alter the behavior of XGBoost and how to tune them efficiently so that you can supercharge the performance of your models.

Why tune your model?

When is tuning your model a bad idea?

Tuning the number of boosting rounds

Automated boosting round selection using early_stopping

Overview of XGBoost's hyperparameters

Tuning eta

Tuning max_depth

Tuning colsample_bytree

Review of grid search and random search

Grid search with XGBoost

Random search with XGBoost

Limits of grid search and random search

When should you use grid search and random search?

Fine-tuning your XGBoost model

Take your XGBoost skills to the next level by incorporating your models into two end-to-end machine learning pipelines. You'll learn how to tune the most important XGBoost hyperparameters efficiently within a pipeline, and get an introduction to some more advanced preprocessing techniques.

Review of pipelines using sklearn

Exploratory data analysis

Encoding categorical columns I: LabelEncoder

Encoding categorical columns II: OneHotEncoder

Encoding categorical columns III: DictVectorizer

Preprocessing within a pipeline

Incorporating XGBoost into pipelines

Cross-validating your XGBoost model

Kidney disease case study I: Categorical Imputer

Kidney disease case study II: Feature Union

Kidney disease case study III: Full pipeline

Tuning XGBoost hyperparameters

Bringing it all together

Final Thoughts

Using XGBoost in pipelines

Ames housing prices (preprocessed)

Ames housing prices (original)

Chronic kidney disease

Do you know the basics of supervised learning and want 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, with models using XGBoost regularly winning online data science competitions and being 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 and regression problems.

Supervised Learning with scikit-learn

Explore the fundamentals of gradient boosting, with a focus on Regression with XGBoost, using XGBoost in pipelines and how to fine-tune your XGBoost model.

Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost

Learn the fundamentals of gradient boosting and build state-of-the-art machine learning models using XGBoost to solve classification and regression problems.

Machine Learning Scientist in Python

Supervised Machine Learning in Python

Likely to Recommend

Grid search with XGBoost

“Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost”

Exercise instructions

Hands-on interactive exercise

Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost

Chapter 1: Classification with XGBoost

Chapter 2: Regression with XGBoost

Chapter 3: Fine-tuning your XGBoost model

Chapter 4: Using XGBoost in pipelines

What is DataCamp?