I’ve always wanted to have a minimal unified interface to XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM and sklearn's GradientBoosting, without worrying about the different parameters names aliases. So, I had a lot of fun creating unifiedbooster (which is not part of Techtonique, but is a personal swiss knife tool, under the MIT License).

In unifiedbooster, there are 5 main common parameters for each algorithm:

• n_estimators: maximum number of trees that can be built
• learning_rate: shrinkage rate; used for reducing the gradient step
• max_depth: maximum tree depth
• rowsample: subsample ratio of the training instances
• colsample: percentage of features to use at each node split

In many situations, these are enough for obtaining robust “baselines” (and the whole documentation can be found here). Additional parameters can be provided thanks to the **kwargs (even though that’s not the main philosophy of the tool).

I present a Python version and an R version.

Python version

!pip install unifiedbooster

There are many ways to calibrate the boosters, which all rely on GPopt. I’ll present only one today (the other ones in a few weeks): Bayesian optimization.

import unifiedbooster as ub
from sklearn.datasets import load_iris, load_breast_cancer, load_wine
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.linear_model import ElasticNetCV
from sklearn.kernel_ridge import KernelRidge
from sklearn.metrics import f1_score, accuracy_score, precision_score, recall_score
from time import time

dataset = load_breast_cancer()
X, y = dataset.data, dataset.target # data set
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(
    X, y, test_size=0.2, random_state=42
) # split data into training set and test set

# Find 'good' hyperparameters for LightGBM
# Obtain 'best' model's performance on test set
res = ub.cross_val_optim(X_train=X_train,
                          y_train=y_train,
                          X_test=X_test,
                          y_test=y_test,
                          model_type="lightgbm", # or 'lightgbm', 'gradientboosting', 'catboost'
                          type_fit="classification",
                          scoring="accuracy",
                          n_estimators=250,
                          cv=5, # numbers of folds in cross-validation
                          verbose=1,
                          seed=123)
print(res)

 Creating initial design... 


 ...Done. 


 Optimization loop... 

190/190 [██████████████████████████████] - 45s 237ms/step
result(best_params={'learning_rate': 0.9611431739764045, 'max_depth': 1, 'rowsample': 0.597564697265625, 'colsample': 0.508392333984375, 'model_type': 'lightgbm', 'n_estimators': 250}, best_score=-0.9780219780219781, test_accuracy=0.9736842105263158)

How do we verify what we’ve just did?

# Initialize the unified clf 
clf = ub.GBDTClassifier(**res.best_params)

# Fit the model
clf.fit(X_train, y_train)

# Predict on the test set
y_pred = clf.predict(X_test)

# Evaluate model's accuracy on test set
print(accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred))

0.9736842105263158

Classification report

from sklearn.metrics import classification_report
print(classification_report(y_test, y_pred))

              precision    recall  f1-score   support

           0       0.98      0.95      0.96        43
           1       0.97      0.99      0.98        71

    accuracy                           0.97       114
   macro avg       0.97      0.97      0.97       114
weighted avg       0.97      0.97      0.97       114

Confusion matrix

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix

conf_matrix = confusion_matrix(y_test, y_pred)
sns.heatmap(conf_matrix,
            annot=True,
            fmt='g',
            xticklabels=clf.classes_,
            yticklabels=clf.classes_,
    )
plt.ylabel('Prediction',fontsize=13)
plt.xlabel('Actual',fontsize=13)
plt.title('Confusion Matrix',fontsize=17)
plt.show()

R version

In the same environment as the Python environment:

utils::install.packages("reticulate")
library("reticulate")
unifiedbooster <- import("unifiedbooster")

Get data:

utils::install.packages("palmerpenguins")
library("palmerpenguins")


penguins_ <- as.data.frame(palmerpenguins::penguins)
# replacing NA's by the median

replacement <- median(palmerpenguins::penguins$bill_length_mm, na.rm = TRUE)
penguins_$bill_length_mm[is.na(palmerpenguins::penguins$bill_length_mm)] <- replacement

replacement <- median(palmerpenguins::penguins$bill_depth_mm, na.rm = TRUE)
penguins_$bill_depth_mm[is.na(palmerpenguins::penguins$bill_depth_mm)] <- replacement

replacement <- median(palmerpenguins::penguins$flipper_length_mm, na.rm = TRUE)
penguins_$flipper_length_mm[is.na(palmerpenguins::penguins$flipper_length_mm)] <- replacement

replacement <- median(palmerpenguins::penguins$body_mass_g, na.rm = TRUE)
penguins_$body_mass_g[is.na(palmerpenguins::penguins$body_mass_g)] <- replacement

# replacing NA's by the most frequent occurence
penguins_$sex[is.na(palmerpenguins::penguins$sex)] <- "male" # most frequent

# one-hot encoding
penguins_mat <- model.matrix(species ~., data=penguins_)[,-1]
penguins_mat <- cbind(penguins$species, penguins_mat)
penguins_mat <- as.data.frame(penguins_mat)
colnames(penguins_mat)[1] <- "species"

y <- as.integer(penguins_mat$species) - 1L
X <- as.matrix(penguins_mat[,2:ncol(penguins_mat)])

n <- nrow(X)
p <- ncol(X)

set.seed(123)
index_train <- sample(1:n, size=floor(0.8*n))

X_train <- X[index_train, c("islandDream", "islandTorgersen", "flipper_length_mm")]
y_train <- y[index_train]
X_test <- X[-index_train, c("islandDream", "islandTorgersen", "flipper_length_mm") ]
y_test <- y[-index_train]

Find hyperparameters:

res <- unifiedbooster$cross_val_optim(X_train=X_train,
                          y_train=y_train,
                          X_test=X_test,
                          y_test=y_test,
                          model_type="xgboost",
                          type_fit="classification",
                          scoring="accuracy",
                          n_estimators=100L,
                          cv=5L, # numbers of folds in cross-validation
                          verbose=1L,
                          seed=123L)
print(res)

check

# Initialize the unified clf 
clf = do.call(unifiedbooster$GBDTClassifier, res$best_params)

# Fit the model
clf$fit(X_train, y_train)

# Predict on the test set
y_pred = clf$predict(X_test)

# Evaluate model's accuracy on test set
print(mean(y_test == y_pred))