# A Guide to Gradient Boosted Trees with XGBoost in Python¶

XGBoost has become incredibly popular on Kaggle in the last year for any problems dealing with structured data. I was already familiar with sklearn's version of gradient boosting and have used it before, but I hadn't really considered trying XGBoost instead until I became more familiar with it. I was perfectly happy with sklearn's version and didn't think much of switching. So why have so many started using it? There are a variety of answers I am sure others have come up with, but the main reason for me can be summarized in one word:

Speed.

You can see from this paper on XGBoost's first major debut in the Higgs-Boson Kaggle competition that XGBoost has a nice speed advantage over sklearn. Here is Figure 3 from the paper:

In addition, Szilard Pafka has done an excellent benchmark of a variety of machine learning libraries and he also found XGBoost to be much faster.

What about XGBoost makes it faster? Gradient boosted trees, as you may be aware, have to be built in series so that a step of gradient descent can be taken in order to minimize a loss function. Unlike Random Forests, you can't simply build the trees in parallel. XGBoost, however, builds the tree itself in a parallel fashion. You can see more details about this in section 4.1 of the XGBoost paper by Chen and Guestrin here, but essentially the information contained in each feature column can have statistics calculated on it in parallel (along with an initial sort of the columns).

What you get in return for this speed is a much faster grid search for optimizing hyperparameters in model tuning.

To show you what the library can do in addition to some of its more advanced features, I am going to walk us through an example classification problem with the library.

## Getting and Preprocessing the Data¶

I decided a nice dataset to use for this example comes yet again from the UC-Irvine Machine Learning repository. This dataset is the classic "Adult Data Set". An older set from 1996, this dataset contains census data on income. Our job is to predict whether a certain individual had an income of greater than 50,000 based on their demographic information. In the dataset description found here, we can see that the best model they came up with at the time had an accuracy of 85.95% (14.05% error on the test set). Let's see if we can beat that, shall we?

First, load in numpy/pandas and download the data, which is split into train/test sets already for us. Make sure to skip a header row in this case or pandas will assume the first row is a header.

In [1]:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

In [2]:
train_set = pd.read_csv('http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/adult/adult.data', header = None)
skiprows = 1, header = None) # Make sure to skip a row for the test set


Let's check our train and test sets for any possible issues.

In [3]:
train_set.head()

Out[3]:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
0 39 State-gov 77516 Bachelors 13 Never-married Adm-clerical Not-in-family White Male 2174 0 40 United-States <=50K
1 50 Self-emp-not-inc 83311 Bachelors 13 Married-civ-spouse Exec-managerial Husband White Male 0 0 13 United-States <=50K
2 38 Private 215646 HS-grad 9 Divorced Handlers-cleaners Not-in-family White Male 0 0 40 United-States <=50K
3 53 Private 234721 11th 7 Married-civ-spouse Handlers-cleaners Husband Black Male 0 0 40 United-States <=50K
4 28 Private 338409 Bachelors 13 Married-civ-spouse Prof-specialty Wife Black Female 0 0 40 Cuba <=50K
In [4]:
test_set.head()

Out[4]:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
0 25 Private 226802 11th 7 Never-married Machine-op-inspct Own-child Black Male 0 0 40 United-States <=50K.
1 38 Private 89814 HS-grad 9 Married-civ-spouse Farming-fishing Husband White Male 0 0 50 United-States <=50K.
2 28 Local-gov 336951 Assoc-acdm 12 Married-civ-spouse Protective-serv Husband White Male 0 0 40 United-States >50K.
3 44 Private 160323 Some-college 10 Married-civ-spouse Machine-op-inspct Husband Black Male 7688 0 40 United-States >50K.
4 18 ? 103497 Some-college 10 Never-married ? Own-child White Female 0 0 30 United-States <=50K.

I notice a few problems immediately:

• We don't have a column header for our data
• There seem to be some unknown values in the fifth row of the test set (the question marks) we need to deal with
• The target values have periods at the end in the test set but do not in the training set (<=50K. vs. <=50K)

Based on the accompanying dataset description, we can see the column names. Let's put those in for our train and test first.

In [5]:
col_labels = ['age', 'workclass', 'fnlwgt', 'education', 'education_num', 'marital_status', 'occupation',
'relationship', 'race', 'sex', 'capital_gain', 'capital_loss', 'hours_per_week', 'native_country',
'wage_class']


Apply these to both dataframes.

In [6]:
train_set.columns = col_labels
test_set.columns = col_labels


Next, let's check to see if pandas has identified any of these missing values.

In [7]:
train_set.info()

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 32561 entries, 0 to 32560
Data columns (total 15 columns):
age               32561 non-null int64
workclass         32561 non-null object
fnlwgt            32561 non-null int64
education         32561 non-null object
education_num     32561 non-null int64
marital_status    32561 non-null object
occupation        32561 non-null object
relationship      32561 non-null object
race              32561 non-null object
sex               32561 non-null object
capital_gain      32561 non-null int64
capital_loss      32561 non-null int64
hours_per_week    32561 non-null int64
native_country    32561 non-null object
wage_class        32561 non-null object
dtypes: int64(6), object(9)
memory usage: 3.7+ MB

In [8]:
test_set.info()

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 16281 entries, 0 to 16280
Data columns (total 15 columns):
age               16281 non-null int64
workclass         16281 non-null object
fnlwgt            16281 non-null int64
education         16281 non-null object
education_num     16281 non-null int64
marital_status    16281 non-null object
occupation        16281 non-null object
relationship      16281 non-null object
race              16281 non-null object
sex               16281 non-null object
capital_gain      16281 non-null int64
capital_loss      16281 non-null int64
hours_per_week    16281 non-null int64
native_country    16281 non-null object
wage_class        16281 non-null object
dtypes: int64(6), object(9)
memory usage: 1.9+ MB


Hmm. There don't seem to be any. According to the accompanying notes, the original datasets had 32561 in train and 16281 with test. However, unknowns are included and have been labeled with a question mark (?). The test results documented were done after removing all unknowns. Therefore, to see if we can beat their best results, we need to remove the same unknown rows.

If we do so, we should have 30162 in train and 15060 in test. Let's see if we can remove all of these unknown rows.

It turns out the question mark was actually entered with a space first. Let's do a simple test to see what would happen if we dropped all rows that contain an unknown marked with a ' ?'.

In [9]:
train_set.replace(' ?', np.nan).dropna().shape

Out[9]:
(30162, 15)
In [10]:
test_set.replace(' ?', np.nan).dropna().shape

Out[10]:
(15060, 15)

These must be our missing rows since the numbers add up now if we drop them. Let's apply this change to our test and training sets.

In [11]:
train_nomissing = train_set.replace(' ?', np.nan).dropna()
test_nomissing = test_set.replace(' ?', np.nan).dropna()


Now that we have taken care of the missing value problem, we still have an issue with the target income thresholds being encoded slightly differently in test vs. train. We need these to match up appropriately, so we are going to need to fix either the test or training set to make them match up. Let's replace all of the '<=50K.' with '<=50K' and the same for '>50K.' with '>50K', so essentially, we are just dropping the periods. This is also encoded with a space so include this in the string. We can use the replace method from pandas to fix this.

In [12]:
test_nomissing['wage_class'] = test_nomissing.wage_class.replace({' <=50K.': ' <=50K', ' >50K.':' >50K'})


Checking the unique values from each set, we can see if they now match.

In [13]:
test_nomissing.wage_class.unique()

Out[13]:
array([' <=50K', ' >50K'], dtype=object)
In [14]:
train_nomissing.wage_class.unique()

Out[14]:
array([' <=50K', ' >50K'], dtype=object)

Now these look the same. There is one thing we need to do, however, before applying XGBoost. We need to make sure everything encoded as a string is turned into a variable.

## Applying Ordinal Encoding to Categoricals¶

Our next step is to use ordinal encoding for the features with a string category since XGBoost (like all of the other machine learning algorithms in Python) requires every feature vector to include only digits. To do this properly, however, we will need to join the two together and apply our encoding so that the same categories exist in both datasets when we do train/test evalulation. There is some debate as to whether you are technically supposed to use one-hot encoding for categorical features (since there isn't supposed to be any inherent ordering) but I found this discussion on the subject interesting. It seems that one-hot encoding isn't necessary for tree-based algorithms, but you may run into a problem using this on linear models. I personally find ordinal encoding is more than sufficient and it significantly reduces your memory footprint if you have quite a few categorical features.

First, combine them together into a single dataset.

In [15]:
combined_set = pd.concat([train_nomissing, test_nomissing], axis = 0) # Stacks them vertically

In [16]:
combined_set.info()

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 45222 entries, 0 to 16280
Data columns (total 15 columns):
age               45222 non-null int64
workclass         45222 non-null object
fnlwgt            45222 non-null int64
education         45222 non-null object
education_num     45222 non-null int64
marital_status    45222 non-null object
occupation        45222 non-null object
relationship      45222 non-null object
race              45222 non-null object
sex               45222 non-null object
capital_gain      45222 non-null int64
capital_loss      45222 non-null int64
hours_per_week    45222 non-null int64
native_country    45222 non-null object
wage_class        45222 non-null object
dtypes: int64(6), object(9)
memory usage: 5.5+ MB


We can see they are now combined. Next, if the feature is not already numerical, we need to encode it as one. We can use pandas Categorical codes for this task. To make things more simple, I will use a loop to apply this on every feature that isn't an integer.

In [17]:
for feature in combined_set.columns: # Loop through all columns in the dataframe
if combined_set[feature].dtype == 'object': # Only apply for columns with categorical strings
combined_set[feature] = pd.Categorical(combined_set[feature]).codes # Replace strings with an integer

In [18]:
combined_set.info()

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 45222 entries, 0 to 16280
Data columns (total 15 columns):
age               45222 non-null int64
workclass         45222 non-null int8
fnlwgt            45222 non-null int64
education         45222 non-null int8
education_num     45222 non-null int64
marital_status    45222 non-null int8
occupation        45222 non-null int8
relationship      45222 non-null int8
race              45222 non-null int8
sex               45222 non-null int8
capital_gain      45222 non-null int64
capital_loss      45222 non-null int64
hours_per_week    45222 non-null int64
native_country    45222 non-null int8
wage_class        45222 non-null int8
dtypes: int64(6), int8(9)
memory usage: 2.8 MB


Now that we have all of our features encoded, we need to split these back into their original train/test sizes. Since they haven't been shuffled we just need to retrieve the same indices as before.

In [19]:
final_train = combined_set[:train_nomissing.shape[0]] # Up to the last initial training set row
final_test = combined_set[train_nomissing.shape[0]:] # Past the last initial training set row


We can now finally start playing around with XGBoost.

We still have our target value inside our train and test frames that needs to be separated from the feature vectors we will be feeding into XGBoost. Let's get those now.

In [20]:
y_train = final_train.pop('wage_class')
y_test = final_test.pop('wage_class')


Now import the libraries we will need to do grid search for XGBoost. Fortunately for those of us used to sklearn's API, XGBoost is compatible with this, so we can still utilize the traditional GridSearch with XGBoost.

In [21]:
import xgboost as xgb
from sklearn.grid_search import GridSearchCV


To see all of the available parameters that can be tuned in XGBoost, have a look at the parameter documentation. This should help you better understand the choices I am making to start off our first grid search. I am going to start tuning on the maximum depth of the trees first, along with the min_child_weight, which is very similar to min_samples_split in sklearn's version of gradient boosted trees. We set the objective to 'binary:logistic' since this is a binary classification problem (although you can specify your own custom objective function if you wish: an example is available here).

In [22]:
cv_params = {'max_depth': [3,5,7], 'min_child_weight': [1,3,5]}
ind_params = {'learning_rate': 0.1, 'n_estimators': 1000, 'seed':0, 'subsample': 0.8, 'colsample_bytree': 0.8,
'objective': 'binary:logistic'}
optimized_GBM = GridSearchCV(xgb.XGBClassifier(**ind_params),
cv_params,
scoring = 'accuracy', cv = 5, n_jobs = -1)
# Optimize for accuracy since that is the metric used in the Adult Data Set notation


Now let's run our grid search with 5-fold cross-validation and see which parameters perform the best.

In [23]:
optimized_GBM.fit(final_train, y_train)

Out[23]:
GridSearchCV(cv=5, error_score='raise',
estimator=XGBClassifier(base_score=0.5, colsample_bylevel=1, colsample_bytree=0.8,
gamma=0, learning_rate=0.1, max_delta_step=0, max_depth=3,
objective='binary:logistic', reg_alpha=0, reg_lambda=1,
scale_pos_weight=1, seed=0, silent=True, subsample=0.8),
fit_params={}, iid=True, n_jobs=-1,
param_grid={'min_child_weight': [1, 3, 5], 'max_depth': [3, 5, 7]},
pre_dispatch='2*n_jobs', refit=True, scoring='accuracy', verbose=0)

Let's check our grid scores.

In [24]:
optimized_GBM.grid_scores_

Out[24]:
[mean: 0.86788, std: 0.00268, params: {'min_child_weight': 1, 'max_depth': 3},
mean: 0.86725, std: 0.00287, params: {'min_child_weight': 3, 'max_depth': 3},
mean: 0.86622, std: 0.00345, params: {'min_child_weight': 5, 'max_depth': 3},
mean: 0.86261, std: 0.00308, params: {'min_child_weight': 1, 'max_depth': 5},
mean: 0.86022, std: 0.00288, params: {'min_child_weight': 3, 'max_depth': 5},
mean: 0.86151, std: 0.00303, params: {'min_child_weight': 5, 'max_depth': 5},
mean: 0.85575, std: 0.00266, params: {'min_child_weight': 1, 'max_depth': 7},
mean: 0.85505, std: 0.00225, params: {'min_child_weight': 3, 'max_depth': 7},
mean: 0.85648, std: 0.00296, params: {'min_child_weight': 5, 'max_depth': 7}]

We can see that the first hyperparameter combination performed best and we already beat our target of 85.95% accuracy in our cross-validation! Let's try optimizing some other hyperparameters now to see if we can beat a mean of 86.78% accuracy. This time, we will play around with subsampling along with lowering the learning rate to see if that helps.

In [25]:
cv_params = {'learning_rate': [0.1, 0.01], 'subsample': [0.7,0.8,0.9]}
ind_params = {'n_estimators': 1000, 'seed':0, 'colsample_bytree': 0.8,
'objective': 'binary:logistic', 'max_depth': 3, 'min_child_weight': 1}

optimized_GBM = GridSearchCV(xgb.XGBClassifier(**ind_params),
cv_params,
scoring = 'accuracy', cv = 5, n_jobs = -1)
optimized_GBM.fit(final_train, y_train)

Out[25]:
GridSearchCV(cv=5, error_score='raise',
estimator=XGBClassifier(base_score=0.5, colsample_bylevel=1, colsample_bytree=0.8,
gamma=0, learning_rate=0.1, max_delta_step=0, max_depth=3,
objective='binary:logistic', reg_alpha=0, reg_lambda=1,
scale_pos_weight=1, seed=0, silent=True, subsample=1),
fit_params={}, iid=True, n_jobs=-1,
param_grid={'subsample': [0.7, 0.8, 0.9], 'learning_rate': [0.1, 0.01]},
pre_dispatch='2*n_jobs', refit=True, scoring='accuracy', verbose=0)

Again, check the grid scores.

In [26]:
optimized_GBM.grid_scores_

Out[26]:
[mean: 0.86738, std: 0.00335, params: {'subsample': 0.7, 'learning_rate': 0.1},
mean: 0.86788, std: 0.00268, params: {'subsample': 0.8, 'learning_rate': 0.1},
mean: 0.86765, std: 0.00300, params: {'subsample': 0.9, 'learning_rate': 0.1},
mean: 0.86062, std: 0.00329, params: {'subsample': 0.7, 'learning_rate': 0.01},
mean: 0.86045, std: 0.00284, params: {'subsample': 0.8, 'learning_rate': 0.01},
mean: 0.86012, std: 0.00316, params: {'subsample': 0.9, 'learning_rate': 0.01}]

No, it doesn't look like we can improve on this. However, we may be able to optimize a little further by utilizing XGBoost's built-in cv which allows early stopping to prevent overfitting.

## Early stopping CV¶

Based on the CV testing performed earlier, we want to utilize the following parameters:

• Learning_rate (eta) = 0.1
• Subsample, colsample_bytree = 0.8
• Max_depth = 3
• Min_child_weight = 1

There are a few other parameters we could tune in theory to squeeze out further performance, but this is a good enough starting point.

To increase the performance of XGBoost's speed through many iterations of the training set, and since we are using only XGBoost's API and not sklearn's anymore, we can create a DMatrix. This sorts the data initially to optimize for XGBoost when it builds trees, making the algorithm more efficient. This is especially helpful when you have a very large number of training examples. To create a DMatrix:

In [27]:
xgdmat = xgb.DMatrix(final_train, y_train) # Create our DMatrix to make XGBoost more efficient


Now let's specify our parameters (with slightly different syntax in some places for the XGBoost native API) and set our stopping criteria. For now, let's be aggressive with the stopping and say we don't want the accuracy to improve for at least 100 new trees.

In [28]:
our_params = {'eta': 0.1, 'seed':0, 'subsample': 0.8, 'colsample_bytree': 0.8,
'objective': 'binary:logistic', 'max_depth':3, 'min_child_weight':1}
# Grid Search CV optimized settings

cv_xgb = xgb.cv(params = our_params, dtrain = xgdmat, num_boost_round = 3000, nfold = 5,
metrics = ['error'], # Make sure you enter metrics inside a list or you may encounter issues!
early_stopping_rounds = 100) # Look for early stopping that minimizes error

Will train until cv error hasn't decreased in 100 rounds.
Stopping. Best iteration: 432


We can look at our CV results to see how accurate we were with these settings. The output is automatically saved into a pandas dataframe for us.

In [29]:
cv_xgb.tail(5)

Out[29]:
test-error-mean test-error-std train-error-mean train-error-std
428 0.129169 0.003551 0.116744 0.001206
429 0.129103 0.003582 0.116678 0.001209
430 0.129136 0.003748 0.116736 0.001252
431 0.129037 0.003634 0.116695 0.001265
432 0.128970 0.003733 0.116662 0.001220

Our CV test error at this number of iterations is 12.897%, or 87.103% accuracy.

Now that we have our best settings, let's create this as an XGBoost object model that we can reference later.

In [30]:
our_params = {'eta': 0.1, 'seed':0, 'subsample': 0.8, 'colsample_bytree': 0.8,
'objective': 'binary:logistic', 'max_depth':3, 'min_child_weight':1}

final_gb = xgb.train(our_params, xgdmat, num_boost_round = 432)


Notice that it trains very quickly. With our XG model object, we can then plot our feature importances using a built-in method. This is similar to the feature importances found in sklearn.

In [31]:
%matplotlib inline
import seaborn as sns
sns.set(font_scale = 1.5)

In [32]:
xgb.plot_importance(final_gb)

Out[32]:
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x11aaafa90>

This will tell us which features were most important in the series of trees. The 'fnlwgt' feature seems to have the most importance. Filing capital gains was also important, which makes sense given that only those with greater incomes have the ability to invest. Race and sex were not as important. This may be because we are just predicting a specific threshold (below/above 50000 a year) instead of a precise income.

If the built-in feature importance method isn't what you wanted, you can make your own chart of feature importances using the get_fscore method:

In [33]:
importances = final_gb.get_fscore()
importances

Out[33]:
{'age': 321,
'capital_gain': 361,
'capital_loss': 302,
'education': 100,
'education_num': 174,
'fnlwgt': 435,
'hours_per_week': 239,
'marital_status': 117,
'native_country': 93,
'occupation': 267,
'race': 64,
'relationship': 141,
'sex': 42,
'workclass': 115}

Given this dictionary, we can now make a plot of it ourselves.

In [34]:
importance_frame = pd.DataFrame({'Importance': list(importances.values()), 'Feature': list(importances.keys())})
importance_frame.sort_values(by = 'Importance', inplace = True)
importance_frame.plot(kind = 'barh', x = 'Feature', figsize = (8,8), color = 'orange')

Out[34]:
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x11adf7be0>

Now that we have an understanding of the feature importances, we can at least figure out better what is driving the splits most for the trees and where we may be able to make some improvements in feature engineering if possible. You can try playing around with the hyperparameters yourself or engineer some new features to see if you can beat the current benchmarks.

## Analyzing Performance on Test Data¶

The model has now been tuned using cross-validation grid search through the sklearn API and early stopping through the built-in XGBoost API. Now, we can see how it finally performs on the test set. Does it match our CV performance? First, create another DMatrix (this time for the test data).

In [35]:
testdmat = xgb.DMatrix(final_test)


Now let's use sklearn's accuracy metric to see how well we did on the test set.

In [36]:
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
y_pred = final_gb.predict(testdmat) # Predict using our testdmat
y_pred

Out[36]:
array([ 0.00255285,  0.21902142,  0.33375221, ...,  0.80759072,
0.11945596,  0.76449865], dtype=float32)

You can see that the predict function for XGBoost outputs probabilities by default and not actual class labels. To calculate accuracy we need to convert these to a 0/1 label. We will set 0.5 probability as our threshold.

In [37]:
y_pred[y_pred > 0.5] = 1
y_pred[y_pred <= 0.5] = 0
y_pred

Out[37]:
array([ 0.,  0.,  0., ...,  1.,  0.,  1.], dtype=float32)

Now we can calculate our accuracy.

In [38]:
accuracy_score(y_pred, y_test), 1-accuracy_score(y_pred, y_test)

Out[38]:
(0.86945551128818066, 0.13054448871181934)

Our final accuracy is 86.94%, or a 13.05% error rate. We beat our goal by a whole percentage point!

There is probably more that we could do to improve this model, such as additional hyperparameter tuning or even some additional feature engineering. However, according to the guidelines of the original data, we beat their best performance. It has been 20 years since the data was originally submitted . . . so we shouldn't be too surprised!

## Ideas for Improvement and Summary¶

In this post, we explored some of the basic functionality involving the XGBoost library. We also learned how it works and why it performs faster than other gradient boosting libraries do. As a test, we used it on an example dataset of US incomes, beating the performance of other documented models for the dataset with very little effort. We were also able to investigate feature importances to see which features were influencing the model most.

Possible ideas for using XGBoost in the future:

• Make sure to read the documentation thoroughly if you want to utilize some of its more advanced features
• This is a rapidly evolving library, so additional features may be introduced that affect its functionality
• XGBoost is available in most of the other common languages for data science as well such as Julia and R if those are preferable
• XGBoost can also now be utilized at scale, running on Spark and Flink with the recently released XGBoost4J