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

Comparing LightGBM, XGBoost, and Deep Learning

The previous chapter introduced LightGBM for building gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs). In this chapter, we compare LightGBM against two other methods for modeling tabular data: XGBoost, another library for building gradient-boosted trees, and deep neural networks (DNNs), a state-of-the-art machine learning technique.

We compare LightGBM, XGBoost, and DNNs on two datasets, focusing on complexity, dataset preparation, model performance, and training time.

This chapter is aimed at advanced readers, and some understanding of deep learning is required. However, the primary purpose of the chapter is not to understand XGBoost or DNNs in detail (neither technique is used in subsequent chapters). Instead, by the end of the chapter, you should have some understanding of how competitive LightGBM is within the machine-learning landscape.

The main topics are as follows:

  • An overview of XGBoost
  • Deep learning and TabTransformers...