Gradient Boosting Machines - Yousef's Notes
Gradient Boosting Machines

Gradient Boosting Machines

zEnsemble Methods that build models by combining multiple weak learners (typically Decision Trees) to create a strong predictive model (e.g. Random Forest).

  • XGBoost
  • LightGBM
  • CatBoost

#How it works

  • Minimize a loss function (e.g. MSE, log loss) using Gradient Descent and iteratively improve the model.
  1. Initialization: Simple model to predict mean value ( #ml/regression ) or uniform probabilities #ml/classification .
  2. Compute residuals: difference between observed values and model predictions (residuals).
  3. Fit a weak learner: train it to predict the residuals from the previous step.
  4. Update the model: Add the predictions from the weak learner to the model, scaled by a learning rate.
  5. Iterate: until matching a stopping criterion (e.g. num. iterations, no improvement in performance).

#Preconditions

#Evaluation

#Advantages

  • High predictive accuracy
  • Handles non-linear relationships

#Limitations

  • Computationally expensive
  • Sensitive to ?