Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

By : Andrich van Wyk
3 (1)
Book Image

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python

3 (1)
By: Andrich van Wyk

Overview of this book

Machine Learning with LightGBM and Python is a comprehensive guide to learning the basics of machine learning and progressing to building scalable machine learning systems that are ready for release. This book will get you acquainted with the high-performance gradient-boosting LightGBM framework and show you how it can be used to solve various machine-learning problems to produce highly accurate, robust, and predictive solutions. Starting with simple machine learning models in scikit-learn, you’ll explore the intricacies of gradient boosting machines and LightGBM. You’ll be guided through various case studies to better understand the data science processes and learn how to practically apply your skills to real-world problems. As you progress, you’ll elevate your software engineering skills by learning how to build and integrate scalable machine-learning pipelines to process data, train models, and deploy them to serve secure APIs using Python tools such as FastAPI. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to use various -of-the-art tools that will help you build production-ready systems, including FLAML for AutoML, PostgresML for operating ML pipelines using Postgres, high-performance distributed training and serving via Dask, and creating and running models in the Cloud with AWS Sagemaker.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Gradient Boosting and LightGBM Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Practical Machine Learning with LightGBM
10
Part 3: Production-ready Machine Learning with LightGBM

Summary

This chapter introduced LightGBM as a library to train boosted machines efficiently. We looked at where the complexity of building GBDTs comes from and the features in LightGBM that address them, such as histogram-based sampling, feature bundling, and GOSS. We also reviewed LightGBM’s most important hyperparameters.

We also gave a detailed overview of using LightGBM in Python, covering both the LightGBM Python API and the scikit-learn API. We then built our first tuned models using LightGBM to predict student academic performance, utilizing cross-validation and grid-search-based parameter optimization.

In the next chapter, we compare LightGBM against another popular gradient-boosting library, XGBoost, and DL techniques for tabular data.