BOOSTING

XGBoost

Gradient boosting for regression with 5-fold cross-validation, automatic early stopping, and SHAP-based feature contributions.

What Makes This Powerful

5-Fold Cross-Validation

Automatic hyperparameter selection with early stopping (10 rounds). Fixed parameters: max_depth=6, learning_rate=0.1, subsample=0.8, colsample_bytree=0.8.

Feature Importance Metrics

Four importance measures: Gain (improvement per split), Cover (data coverage), Frequency (usage count), and SHAP contributions (average absolute impact).

Regression Focus

Uses reg:squarederror objective with RMSE evaluation. Automatic conversion of categorical features to numeric (0-based encoding). Handles missing values by replacement.

What You Need to Provide

Regression dataset required

Provide features array (column names) and target (numeric column for regression). Categorical features are automatically converted to 0-based numeric encoding.

Algorithm runs 5-fold cross-validation to find optimal number of trees (up to 100 rounds with early stopping). Calculates R², RMSE, MAE, and generates feature importance using Gain, Cover, Frequency, and SHAP contributions.

Tabular Schema / features + target

Quick Specs

Objectivereg:squarederror only
CV Folds5-fold with early stopping
Max Trees100 rounds (auto-selected)
OutputsR², RMSE, MAE, importances

How We Train

From data prep to explainable predictions

1

Data Preprocessing

Convert categorical features to 0-based numeric encoding. Replace missing values (0 for features, mean for target). Create DMatrix for XGBoost processing.

2

Cross-Validation

Run 5-fold CV with fixed parameters (depth=6, eta=0.1, subsample=0.8). Early stopping after 10 rounds without improvement. Select best iteration automatically.

3

Feature Analysis

Calculate 4 importance metrics: Gain, Cover, Frequency, SHAP contributions. Generate residual plots, actual vs predicted visualizations, and CV performance curves.

Why This Analysis Matters

XGBoost regression with automatic parameter selection through 5-fold cross-validation and early stopping to prevent overfitting.

Provides four complementary feature importance measures: Gain (split improvement), Cover (observation coverage), Frequency (usage count), and SHAP contributions (average absolute impact). Fixed hyperparameters ensure consistent, reproducible results.

Note: Currently supports regression only (reg:squarederror). Categorical features automatically converted to numeric. Missing values replaced with 0 (features) or mean (target). Max 100 boosting rounds with early stopping after 10 rounds.

Ready to Boost?

Train an accurate, explainable model

Read the article: XGBoost