############ DART booster ############ XGBoost mostly combines a huge number of regression trees with a small learning rate. In this situation, trees added early are significant and trees added late are unimportant. Vinayak and Gilad-Bachrach proposed a new method to add dropout techniques from the deep neural net community to boosted trees, and reported better results in some situations. This is a instruction of new tree booster ``dart``. ************** Original paper ************** Rashmi Korlakai Vinayak, Ran Gilad-Bachrach. "DART: Dropouts meet Multiple Additive Regression Trees." `JMLR `_. ******** Features ******** - Drop trees in order to solve the over-fitting. - Trivial trees (to correct trivial errors) may be prevented. Because of the randomness introduced in the training, expect the following few differences: - Training can be slower than ``gbtree`` because the random dropout prevents usage of the prediction buffer. - The early stop might not be stable, due to the randomness. ************ How it works ************ - In :math:`m`-th training round, suppose :math:`k` trees are selected to be dropped. - Let :math:`D = \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i` be the leaf scores of dropped trees and :math:`F_m = \eta \tilde{F}_m` be the leaf scores of a new tree. - The objective function is as follows: .. math:: \mathrm{Obj} = \sum_{j=1}^n L \left( y_j, \hat{y}_j^{m-1} - D_j + \tilde{F}_m \right) + \Omega \left( \tilde{F}_m \right). - :math:`D` and :math:`F_m` are overshooting, so using scale factor .. math:: \hat{y}_j^m = \sum_{i \not\in \mathbf{K}} F_i + a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + b F_m \right) . ********** Parameters ********** The booster ``dart`` inherits ``gbtree`` booster, so it supports all parameters that ``gbtree`` does, such as ``eta``, ``gamma``, ``max_depth`` etc. Additional parameters are noted below: * ``sample_type``: type of sampling algorithm. - ``uniform``: (default) dropped trees are selected uniformly. - ``weighted``: dropped trees are selected in proportion to weight. * ``normalize_type``: type of normalization algorithm. - ``tree``: (default) New trees have the same weight of each of dropped trees. .. math:: a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + \frac{1}{k} F_m \right) &= a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + \frac{\eta}{k} \tilde{F}_m \right) \\ &\sim a \left( 1 + \frac{\eta}{k} \right) D \\ &= a \frac{k + \eta}{k} D = D , \\ &\quad a = \frac{k}{k + \eta} - ``forest``: New trees have the same weight of sum of dropped trees (forest). .. math:: a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + F_m \right) &= a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + \eta \tilde{F}_m \right) \\ &\sim a \left( 1 + \eta \right) D \\ &= a (1 + \eta) D = D , \\ &\quad a = \frac{1}{1 + \eta} . * ``rate_drop``: dropout rate. - range: [0.0, 1.0] * ``skip_drop``: probability of skipping dropout. - If a dropout is skipped, new trees are added in the same manner as gbtree. - range: [0.0, 1.0] ************* Sample Script ************* .. code-block:: python import xgboost as xgb # read in data dtrain = xgb.DMatrix('demo/data/agaricus.txt.train') dtest = xgb.DMatrix('demo/data/agaricus.txt.test') # specify parameters via map param = {'booster': 'dart', 'max_depth': 5, 'learning_rate': 0.1, 'objective': 'binary:logistic', 'sample_type': 'uniform', 'normalize_type': 'tree', 'rate_drop': 0.1, 'skip_drop': 0.5} num_round = 50 bst = xgb.train(param, dtrain, num_round) preds = bst.predict(dtest)