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

Optuna and optimization algorithms

Examples from previous chapters have shown that choosing the best hyperparameters for a problem is critical in solving a machine learning problem. The hyperparameters significantly impact the algorithm’s performance and generalization capability. The optimal parameters are also specific to the model used and the learning problem being solved.

Other issues complicating hyperparameter optimization are as follows:

  • Cost: For each unique set of hyperparameters (of which there can be many), an entire training run, often with cross-validation, must be performed. This is highly time-consuming and computationally expensive.
  • High-dimensional search spaces: Each parameter can have a vast range of potential values, making testing each value impossible.
  • Parameter interaction: Optimizing each parameter in isolation is often impossible, as some parameters’ values interact with others’ values. A good example is the learning...