Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM): from Zero to Hero (with R and Python code)

Data Con LA 2020
Description
This talk will get you started with gradient boosting machines (GBM), a

very popular machine learning technique providing state-of-the-art

accuracy on numerous business prediction problems. After a quick intro

to machine learning and the GBM algorithm, I will show how easy it is to

train and then use GBMs in real-life business applications using some

the most popular open source implementations (xgboost, lightgbm and

h2o). We'll do all this in both R and Python with only a few lines of

code and this talk will be accessible for a wide audience (with limited

prior knowledge of machine learning). Finally, in the last part of the

talk I will provide plenty of references that can get you to the next

level. GBMs are a powerful technique to have in your machine learning

toolbox, because despite all the latest hype about deep learning (neural

nets) and AI, in fact GBMs usually outperform neural networks on

structured/tabular data most often encountered in business applications.

Speaker
Szilard Pafka, Epoch, Chief Scientist