This paper presents the key algorithmic techniques behind CatBoost, a new gradient boosting toolkit. Their combination leads to CatBoost outperforming other publicly available boosting implementations in terms of quality on a variety of datasets. Two critical algorithmic advances introduced in CatBoost are the implementation of ordered boosting, a permutation-driven alternative to the classic algorithm, and an innovative algorithm for processing categorical features. Both techniques were created to fight a prediction shift caused by a special kind of target leakage present in all currently existing implementations of gradient boosting algorithms. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of this problem and demonstrate that proposed algorithms solve it effectively, leading to excellent empirical results.
Thus, using TS as new numerical features seems to be the most efficient method of handling categorical features with minimum information loss. TS are widely-used, e.g., in the click prediction task (click-through rates) @cite_19 @cite_10 @cite_23 @cite_7 , where such categorical features as user, region, ad, publisher play a crucial role. We further focus on ways to calculate TS and leave one-hot encoding and gradient statistics out of the scope of the current paper. At the same time, we believe that the ordering principle proposed in this paper is also effective for gradient statistics.
@cite_19 @cite_10 @cite_7 @cite_23
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For statistical learning, categorical variables in a table are usually considered as discrete entities and encoded separately to feature vectors, e.g., with one-hot encoding. “Dirty” non-curated data give rise to categorical variables with a very high cardinality but redundancy: several categories reflect the same entity. In databases, this issue is typically solved with a deduplication step. We show that a simple approach that exposes the redundancy to the learning algorithm brings significant gains. We study a generalization of one-hot encoding, similarity encoding, that builds feature vectors from similarities across categories. We perform a thorough empirical validation on non-curated tables, a problem seldom studied in machine learning. Results on seven real-world datasets show that similarity encoding brings significant gains in predictive performance in comparison with known encoding methods for categories or strings, notably one-hot encoding and bag of character n-grams. We draw practical recommendations for encoding dirty categories: 3-gram similarity appears to be a good choice to capture morphological resemblance. For very high-cardinalities, dimensionality reduction significantly reduces the computational cost with little loss in performance: random projections or choosing a subset of prototype categories still outperform classic encoding approaches. Recently, methods with learning procedure have been widely used to solve person re-identification (re-id) problem. However, most existing databases for re-id are smallscale, therefore, over-fitting is likely to occur. To further improve the performance, we propose a novel method by fusing multiple local features and exploring their structural information on different levels. The proposed method is called Structural Constraints Enhanced Feature Accumulation (SCEFA). Three local features (i.e., Hierarchical Weighted Histograms (HWH), Gabor Ternary Pattern HSV (GTP-HSV), Maximally Stable Color Regions (MSCR)) are used. Structural information of these features are deeply explored in three levels: pixel, blob, and part. The matching algorithms corresponding to the features are also discussed. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets: VIPeR, ETHZ and our own challenging dataset MCSSH, show that our approach outperforms stat-of-the-art methods significantly. We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. Predicting user responses, such as clicks and conversions, is of great importance and has found its usage inmany Web applications including recommender systems, websearch and online advertising. The data in those applicationsis mostly categorical and contains multiple fields, a typicalrepresentation is to transform it into a high-dimensional sparsebinary feature representation via one-hot encoding. Facing withthe extreme sparsity, traditional models may limit their capacityof mining shallow patterns from the data, i.e. low-order featurecombinations. Deep models like deep neural networks, on theother hand, cannot be directly applied for the high-dimensionalinput because of the huge feature space. In this paper, we proposea Product-based Neural Networks (PNN) with an embeddinglayer to learn a distributed representation of the categorical data, a product layer to capture interactive patterns between interfieldcategories, and further fully connected layers to explorehigh-order feature interactions. Our experimental results on twolarge-scale real-world ad click datasets demonstrate that PNNsconsistently outperform the state-of-the-art models on various metrics.