#' Importance of features in a model. #' #' Creates a \code{data.table} of feature importances in a model. #' #' @param feature_names character vector of feature names. If the model already #' contains feature names, those would be used when \code{feature_names=NULL} (default value). #' Non-null \code{feature_names} could be provided to override those in the model. #' @param model object of class \code{xgb.Booster}. #' @param data deprecated. #' @param label deprecated. #' @param target deprecated. #' #' @details #' #' This function works for both linear and tree models. #' #' For linear models, the importance is the absolute magnitude of linear coefficients. #' For that reason, in order to obtain a meaningful ranking by importance for a linear model, #' the features need to be on the same scale (which you also would want to do when using either #' L1 or L2 regularization). #' #' @return #' #' For a tree model, a \code{data.table} with the following columns: #' \itemize{ #' \item \code{Features} names of the features used in the model; #' \item \code{Gain} represents fractional contribution of each feature to the model based on #' the total gain of this feature's splits. Higher percentage means a more important #' predictive feature. #' \item \code{Cover} metric of the number of observation related to this feature; #' \item \code{Frequency} percentage representing the relative number of times #' a feature have been used in trees. #' } #' #' A linear model's importance \code{data.table} has only two columns: #' \itemize{ #' \item \code{Features} names of the features used in the model; #' \item \code{Weight} the linear coefficient of this feature. #' } #' #' If you don't provide or \code{model} doesn't have \code{feature_names}, #' index of the features will be used instead. Because the index is extracted from the model dump #' (based on C++ code), it starts at 0 (as in C/C++ or Python) instead of 1 (usual in R). #' #' @examples #' #' data(agaricus.train, package='xgboost') #' #' bst <- xgboost(data = agaricus.train$data, label = agaricus.train$label, max_depth = 2, #' eta = 1, nthread = 2, nrounds = 2,objective = "binary:logistic") #' #' xgb.importance(model = bst) #' #' @export xgb.importance <- function(feature_names = NULL, model = NULL, data = NULL, label = NULL, target = NULL){ if (!(is.null(data) && is.null(label) && is.null(target))) warning("xgb.importance: parameters 'data', 'label' and 'target' are deprecated") if (!inherits(model, "xgb.Booster")) stop("model: must be an object of class xgb.Booster") if (is.null(feature_names) && !is.null(model$feature_names)) feature_names <- model$feature_names if (!(is.null(feature_names) || is.character(feature_names))) stop("feature_names: Has to be a character vector") model_text_dump <- xgb.dump(model = model, with_stats = TRUE) # linear model if(model_text_dump[2] == "bias:"){ weights <- which(model_text_dump == "weight:") %>% {model_text_dump[(. + 1):length(model_text_dump)]} %>% as.numeric if(is.null(feature_names)) feature_names <- seq(to = length(weights)) if (length(feature_names) != length(weights)) stop("feature_names has less elements than there are features used in the model") result <- data.table(Feature = feature_names, Weight = weights)[order(-abs(Weight))] } else { # tree model result <- xgb.model.dt.tree(feature_names = feature_names, text = model_text_dump)[ Feature != "Leaf", .(Gain = sum(Quality), Cover = sum(Cover), Frequency = .N), by = Feature][ ,`:=`(Gain = Gain / sum(Gain), Cover = Cover / sum(Cover), Frequency = Frequency / sum(Frequency))][ order(Gain, decreasing = TRUE)] } result } # Avoid error messages during CRAN check. # The reason is that these variables are never declared # They are mainly column names inferred by Data.table... globalVariables(c(".", ".N", "Gain", "Cover", "Frequency", "Feature"))