CatBoost
CatBoost is an open-source machine learning algorithm developed by Yandex for gradient boosting on decision trees. It is fast, scalable, and supports a variety of data types including categorical features without one-hot encoding.
gradient-boosting
decision-trees
categorical-features
open-source
CatBoost: Fast and Scalable Gradient Boosting
Open-source machine learning algorithm for gradient boosting on decision trees, supporting various data types including categorical features without one-hot encoding.
What is CatBoost?
CatBoost is an open-source gradient boosting library developed by Yandex aimed at achieving state-of-the-art results in machine learning contests. Here are some key features of CatBoost:
- Supports categorical features without explicitly converting them to numerical features using techniques like one-hot encoding. This allows CatBoost to better handle categories with high cardinality.
- Efficiently handles large-scale problems with tens of millions of examples/features.
- Automatically deals with overfitting using permutation-driven feature subsampling and other techniques.
- Supports GPU and multi-GPU training to speed up model training.
- Provides Python and R APIs for easy integration into ML workflows.
- Often achieves leading scores on popular machine learning benchmarks like Kaggle competitions.
Some of the use cases where CatBoost excels are:
- Recommendation engines
- Search and ranking systems
- Predictive maintenance
- Fraud detection
- Risk modeling
- Churn prediction
Overall, CatBoost should be considered as a top choice library for applying gradient boosting due to its prediction quality and speed. The automated handling of overfitting and GPU support make it very easy to train accurate models.
CatBoost Features
Features
- Gradient boosting on decision trees
- Supports categorical features without one-hot encoding
- Fast and scalable
- Built-in support for GPU and multi-GPU training
- Ranking metrics for learning-to-rank tasks
- Automated overfitting detection and prevention
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Fast training and prediction speed
Handles categorical data well
Easy to install and use
Good accuracy
Built-in regularization to prevent overfitting
Cons
Limited hyperparameter tuning options
Less flexible than XGBoost or LightGBM
Only supports tree-based models
Limited usage outside of tabular data
Official Links
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