10 Confusing XGBoost Hyperparameters and How to Tune Them Like a Pro in 2023

<p>Today, I am going to show you how to squeeze XGBoost so hard that both &lsquo;o&rsquo;s pop out. We will achieve this by fine-tuning its hyperparameters to such an extent that it will no longer be able to&nbsp;<em>bst</em>&nbsp;after giving us all the performance it can.</p> <p>This will not be a mere hyperparameter checklist post. Oh no. I will provide a detailed explanation of each of the ten hyperparameters, functionalities, accepted value ranges, best practices, and how to use Optuna for hyperparameter tuning.</p> <p>Let&rsquo;s dive in!</p> <h2>What we wanted all along&hellip;</h2> <p>A dumb underfit XGBoost model is virtually unheard of. Even with default parameter values, it performs reasonably well on many tabular tasks. However, its biggest problem lies in over-effing-fitting.</p> <p>To address this issue, most of the XGBoost hyperparameters are put there to tame the underlying beast so that it doesn&rsquo;t just swallow up the training set and burp up the bones during testing.</p> <p>Therefore, through hyperparameter tuning, our goal is to strike the optimal balance between a complex model that overfits and a tamed, simple model that generalizes well to unseen data.</p> <p><a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/10-confusing-xgboost-hyperparameters-and-how-to-tune-them-like-a-pro-in-2023-e305057f546">Website</a></p>