New findings show margins are not sufficient for explaining gradient boosting performance.
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Classifier evasion consists in finding for a given instance the nearest instance such that the classifier predictions of and are different. We present two novel algorithms for systematically computing evasions for tree ensembles such as boosted trees and random forests. Our first algorithm uses a Mixe…
Dynamic classifier chains with XGBoost reduces multi-label classification costs and improves label dependency handling.
Fair classification has become an important topic in machine learning research. While most bias mitigation strategies focus on neural networks, we noticed a lack of work on fair classifiers based on decision trees even though they have proven very efficient. In an up-to-date comparison of state-of-the-art classificatio…
Gradient boosted decision trees are a popular machine learning technique, in part because of their ability to give good accuracy with small models. We describe two extensions to the standard tree boosting algorithm designed to increase this advantage. The first improvement extends the boosting formalism from scalar-val…
As machine learning transitions increasingly towards real world applications controlling the test-time cost of algorithms becomes more and more crucial. Recent work, such as the Greedy Miser and Speedboost, incorporate test-time budget constraints into the training procedure and learn classifiers that provably stay wit…
Ensembles of decision trees perform well on many problems, but are not interpretable. In contrast to existing approaches in interpretability that focus on explaining relationships between features and predictions, we propose an alternative approach to interpret tree ensemble classifiers by surfacing representative poin…
Python package for ordinal regression using gradient boosting.
We describe our first-place solution to the Animal Behavior Challenge (ABC 2018) on predicting gender of bird from its GPS trajectory. The task consisted in predicting the gender of shearwater based on how they navigate themselves across a big ocean. The trajectories are collected from GPS loggers attached on shearwate…
Gradient boosting detects insider purchases predicting abnormal returns in microcap stocks.
Boosting can efficiently optimize any loss function without requiring first-order information.
UnmaskingTrees improves tabular data imputation and generation using gradient-boosted decision trees.
Time series data constitutes a distinct and growing problem in machine learning. As the corpus of time series data grows larger, deep models that simultaneously learn features and classify with these features can be intractable or suboptimal. In this paper, we present feature learning via long short term memory (LSTM) …
Combines coarse learners for nonparametric probabilistic regression.
As an adaptive, interpretable, robust, and accurate meta-algorithm for arbitrary differentiable loss functions, gradient tree boosting is one of the most popular machine learning techniques, though the computational expensiveness severely limits its usage. Stochastic gradient boosting could be adopted to accelerates gr…
We present a principled framework to address resource allocation for realizing boosting algorithms on substrates with communication or computation noise. Boosting classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost) make a final decision via a weighted vote from the outputs of many base classifiers (weak classifiers). Suppose that the base cl…
This research tackles uncertainty in gradient boosting models using ensemble methods.
This paper evaluates algorithms for classification and outlier detection accuracies in temporal data. We focus on algorithms that train and classify rapidly and can be used for systems that need to incorporate new data regularly. Hence, we compare the accuracy of six fast algorithms using a range of well-known time-ser…
Gradient boosting with randomized trees reduces discontinuities and complexity.
Our work focuses on the problem of predicting the transfer of pediatric patients from the general ward of a hospital to the pediatric intensive care unit. Using data collected over 5.5 years from the electronic health records of two medical facilities, we develop classifiers based on adaptive boosting and gradient tree…
A method to improve gradient boosting models using stacking.
Wasserstein gradient boosting predicts probability distributions for supervised learning.
This manuscript shows that AdaBoost and its immediate variants can produce approximate maximum margin classifiers simply by scaling step size choices with a fixed small constant. In this way, when the unscaled step size is an optimal choice, these results provide guarantees for Friedman's empirically successful "shrink…
In this survey, we discuss several different types of gradient boosting algorithms and illustrate their mathematical frameworks in detail: 1. introduction of gradient boosting leads to 2. objective function optimization, 3. loss function estimations, and 4. model constructions. 5. application of boosting in ranking.
Infinitesimal gradient boosting is a new algorithm derived from gradient boosting.
Boosting improves accuracy by combining weak learners into a voting classifier.
Boosting algorithms are frequently used in applied data science and in research. To date, the distinction between boosting with either gradient descent or second-order Newton updates is often not made in both applied and methodological research, and it is thus implicitly assumed that the difference is irrelevant. The g…
Functional central limit theorem for kernel gradient flow and infinitesimal gradient boosting
Unified framework for statistical inference in gradient boosting regression.
This paper introduces Stochastic Gradient Langevin Boosting (SGLB) - a powerful and efficient machine learning framework that may deal with a wide range of loss functions and has provable generalization guarantees. The method is based on a special form of the Langevin diffusion equation specifically designed for gradie…
Boosting combines weak classifiers to form highly accurate predictors. Although the case of binary classification is well understood, in the multiclass setting, the "correct" requirements on the weak classifier, or the notion of the most efficient boosting algorithms are missing. In this paper, we create a broad and ge…
New algorithm improves convergence of gradient boosting trees.
In this paper we present CatBoost, a new open-sourced gradient boosting library that successfully handles categorical features and outperforms existing publicly available implementations of gradient boosting in terms of quality on a set of popular publicly available datasets. The library has a GPU implementation of lea…
Stacking improves deep neural network training efficiency.
Boost-R uses gradient boosted trees for analyzing recurrence data.
Gradient tree boosting is a prediction algorithm that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of decision trees, by solving an infinite-dimensional optimization problem. We combine gradient boosting and Nesterov's accelerated descent to design a new algorithm, which we call AGB (for Accelerated…
Gradient boosting is a prediction method that iteratively combines weak learners to produce a complex and accurate model. From an optimization point of view, the learning procedure of gradient boosting mimics a gradient descent on a functional variable. This paper proposes to build upon the proximal point algorithm, wh…
Gradient boosting can be seen as Gaussian process inference.
Boosting is one of the most successful ideas in machine learning. The most well-accepted explanations for the low generalization error of boosting algorithms such as AdaBoost stem from margin theory. The study of margins in the context of boosting algorithms was initiated by Schapire, Freund, Bartlett and Lee (1998) an…
FGBoost boosts gradient boosting for complex data.
Gradient boosting method enforced with individual fairness.
Gradient boosting improved with lassoed trees achieves faster convergence.
Stagewise boosting improves gradient boosting for distributional regression.
A new ensemble learning method called Residual Likelihood Forests improves performance and reduces model size.
sGBM speeds up gradient boosting by parallelizing and adapting base learners.
Boosted Frank-Wolfe accelerates optimization for nonconvex problems.
New GPU algorithm boosts machine learning with larger datasets.
TF Boosted Trees (TFBT) is a new open-sourced frame-work for the distributed training of gradient boosted trees. It is based on TensorFlow, and its distinguishing features include a novel architecture, automatic loss differentiation, layer-by-layer boosting that results in smaller ensembles and faster prediction, princ…