DART booster ============ [XGBoost](https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost)) mostly combines a huge number of regression trees with small learning rate. In this situation, trees added early are significance and trees added late are unimportant. Rasmi et.al proposed a new method to add dropout techniques from deep neural nets community to boosted trees, and reported better results in some situations. This is a instruction of new tree booster `dart`. Original paper -------------- Rashmi Korlakai Vinayak, Ran Gilad-Bachrach. "DART: Dropouts meet Multiple Additive Regression Trees." [JMLR](http://www.jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v38/korlakaivinayak15.pdf) Features -------- - Drop trees in order to solve the over-fitting. - Trivial trees (to correct trivial errors) may be prevented. Because the randomness introduced in the training, expect the following few difference. - Training can be slower than `gbtree` because the random dropout prevents usage of prediction buffer. - The early stop might not be stable, due to the randomness. How it works ------------ - In ``$ m $``th training round, suppose ``$ k $`` trees are selected drop. - Let ``$ D = \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i $`` be leaf scores of dropped trees and ``$ F_m = \eta \tilde{F}_m $`` be leaf scores of a new tree. - The objective function is following: ```math \mathrm{Obj} = \sum_{j=1}^n L \left( y_j, \hat{y}_j^{m-1} - D_j + \tilde{F}_m \right) + \Omega \left( \tilde{F}_m \right). ``` - ``$ D $`` and ``$ F_m $`` are overshooting, so using scale factor ```math \hat{y}_j^m = \sum_{i \not\in \mathbf{K}} F_i + a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + b F_m \right) . ``` Parameters ---------- ### booster * `dart` This booster inherits `gbtree`, so `dart` has also `eta`, `gamma`, `max_depth` and so on. Additional parameters are noted below. ### sample_type type of sampling algorithm. * `uniform`: (default) dropped trees are selected uniformly. * `weighted`: dropped trees are selected in proportion to weight. ### normalize_type type of normalization algorithm. * `tree`: (default) New trees have the same weight of each of dropped trees. ```math a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + \frac{1}{k} F_m \right) &= a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + \frac{\eta}{k} \tilde{F}_m \right) \\ &\sim a \left( 1 + \frac{\eta}{k} \right) D \\ &= a \frac{k + \eta}{k} D = D , \\ &\quad a = \frac{k}{k + \eta} . ``` * `forest`: New trees have the same weight of sum of dropped trees (forest). ```math a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + F_m \right) &= a \left( \sum_{i \in \mathbf{K}} F_i + \eta \tilde{F}_m \right) \\ &\sim a \left( 1 + \eta \right) D \\ &= a (1 + \eta) D = D , \\ &\quad a = \frac{1}{1 + \eta} . ``` ### rate_drop dropout rate. - range: [0.0, 1.0] ### skip_drop probability of skipping dropout. - If a dropout is skipped, new trees are added in the same manner as gbtree. - range: [0.0, 1.0] Sample Script ------------- ```python import xgboost as xgb # read in data dtrain = xgb.DMatrix('demo/data/agaricus.txt.train') dtest = xgb.DMatrix('demo/data/agaricus.txt.test') # specify parameters via map param = {'booster': 'dart', 'max_depth': 5, 'learning_rate': 0.1, 'objective': 'binary:logistic', 'silent': True, 'sample_type': 'uniform', 'normalize_type': 'tree', 'rate_drop': 0.1, 'skip_drop': 0.5} num_round = 50 bst = xgb.train(param, dtrain, num_round) # make prediction # ntree_limit must not be 0 preds = bst.predict(dtest, ntree_limit=num_round) ```