Support adaptive tree, a feature supported by both sklearn and lightgbm. The tree leaf is recomputed based on residue of labels and predictions after construction.
For l1 error, the optimal value is the median (50 percentile).
This is marked as experimental support for the following reasons:
- The value is not well defined for distributed training, where we might have empty leaves for local workers. Right now I just use the original leaf value for computing the average with other workers, which might cause significant errors.
- Some follow-ups are required, for exact, pruner, and optimization for quantile function. Also, we need to calculate the initial estimation.
* Extract partitioner from hist.
* Implement categorical data support by passing the gradient index directly into the partitioner.
* Organize/update document.
* Remove code for negative hessian.
This PR prepares the GHistIndexMatrix to host the column matrix which is used by the hist tree method by accepting sparse_threshold parameter.
Some cleanups are made to ensure the correct batch param is being passed into DMatrix along with some additional tests for correctness of SimpleDMatrix.
This PR rewrites the approx tree method to use codebase from hist for better performance and code sharing.
The rewrite has many benefits:
- Support for both `max_leaves` and `max_depth`.
- Support for `grow_policy`.
- Support for mono constraint.
- Support for feature weights.
- Support for easier bin configuration (`max_bin`).
- Support for categorical data.
- Faster performance for most of the datasets. (many times faster)
- Support for prediction cache.
- Significantly better performance for external memory.
- Unites the code base between approx and hist.
