xgb.cv {xgboost} | R Documentation

## Cross Validation

### Description

The cross validation function of xgboost

### Usage

    xgb.cv(params = list(), data, nrounds, nfold, label = NULL, missing = NA,
      prediction = FALSE, showsd = TRUE, metrics = list(), obj = NULL,
      feval = NULL, stratified = TRUE, folds = NULL, verbose = TRUE,
      print_every_n = 1L, early_stopping_rounds = NULL, maximize = NULL,
      callbacks = list(), ...)

### Arguments

`params`

the list of parameters. Commonly used ones are:

- `objective` objective function, common ones are

  - `reg:squarederror` Regression with squared loss

  - `binary:logistic` logistic regression for classification

- `eta` step size of each boosting step

- `max_depth` maximum depth of the tree

- `nthread` number of thread used in training, if not set, all threads are used

See `xgb.train` for further details. See also demo/ for walkthrough example in R.

`data` | takes an `xgb.DMatrix`, `matrix`, or `dgCMatrix` as the input.
`nrounds` | the max number of iterations
`nfold` | the original dataset is randomly partitioned into `nfold` equal size subsamples.
`label` | vector of response values. Should be provided only when data is an R-matrix.
`missing` | is only used when input is a dense matrix. By default is set to NA, which means that NA values should be considered as 'missing' by the algorithm. Sometimes, 0 or other extreme value might be used to represent missing values.
`prediction` | A logical value indicating whether to return the test fold predictions from each CV model. This parameter engages the `cb.cv.predict` callback.
`showsd` | `boolean`, whether to show standard deviation of cross validation

`metrics,`

list of evaluation metrics to be used in cross validation, when it is not specified, the evaluation metric is chosen according to objective function. Possible options are:

- `error` binary classification error rate

- `rmse` Rooted mean square error

- `logloss` negative log-likelihood function

- `auc` Area under curve

- `aucpr` Area under PR curve

- `merror` Exact matching error, used to evaluate multi-class classification

`obj` | customized objective function. Returns gradient and second order gradient with given prediction and dtrain.
`feval` | customized evaluation function. Returns `list(metric='metric-name', value='metric-value')` with given prediction and dtrain.
`stratified` | a `boolean` indicating whether sampling of folds should be stratified by the values of outcome labels.
`folds` | `list` provides a possibility to use a list of pre-defined CV folds (each element must be a vector of test fold's indices). When folds are supplied, the `nfold` and `stratified` parameters are ignored.
`verbose` | `boolean`, print the statistics during the process
`print_every_n` | Print each n-th iteration evaluation messages when `verbose>0`. Default is 1 which means all messages are printed. This parameter is passed to the `cb.print.evaluation` callback.
`early_stopping_rounds` | If `NULL`, the early stopping function is not triggered. If set to an integer `k`, training with a validation set will stop if the performance doesn't improve for `k` rounds. Setting this parameter engages the `cb.early.stop` callback.
`maximize` | If `feval` and `early_stopping_rounds` are set, then this parameter must be set as well. When it is `TRUE`, it means the larger the evaluation score the better. This parameter is passed to the `cb.early.stop` callback.
`callbacks` | a list of callback functions to perform various task during boosting. See `callbacks`. Some of the callbacks are automatically created depending on the parameters' values. User can provide either existing or their own callback methods in order to customize the training process.
`...` | other parameters to pass to `params`.

### Details

The original sample is randomly partitioned into `nfold` equal size subsamples.

Of the `nfold` subsamples, a single subsample is retained as the validation data for testing the model, and the remaining `nfold - 1` subsamples are used as training data.

The cross-validation process is then repeated `nrounds` times, with each of the `nfold` subsamples used exactly once as the validation data.

All observations are used for both training and validation.

Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%29#k-fold_cross-validation

### Value

An object of class `xgb.cv.synchronous` with the following elements:

- `call` a function call.

- `params` parameters that were passed to the xgboost library. Note that it does not capture parameters changed by the `cb.reset.parameters` callback.

- `callbacks` callback functions that were either automatically assigned or explicitly passed.

- `evaluation_log` evaluation history stored as a `data.table` with the first column corresponding to iteration number and the rest corresponding to the CV-based evaluation means and standard deviations for the training and test CV-sets. It is created by the `cb.evaluation.log` callback.

- `niter` number of boosting iterations.

- `nfeatures` number of features in training data.

- `folds` the list of CV folds' indices - either those passed through the `folds` parameter or randomly generated.

- `best_iteration` iteration number with the best evaluation metric value (only available with early stopping).

- `best_ntreelimit` the `ntreelimit` value corresponding to the best iteration, which could further be used in `predict` method (only available with early stopping).

- `pred` CV prediction values available when `prediction` is set. It is either vector or matrix (see `cb.cv.predict`).

- `models` a liost of the CV folds' models. It is only available with the explicit setting of the `cb.cv.predict(save_models = TRUE)` callback.

### Examples

    data(agaricus.train, package='xgboost')
    dtrain <- xgb.DMatrix(agaricus.train$data, label = agaricus.train$label)
    cv <- xgb.cv(data = dtrain, nrounds = 3, nthread = 2, nfold = 5, metrics = list("rmse","auc"),
                      max_depth = 3, eta = 1, objective = "binary:logistic")
    print(cv)
    print(cv, verbose=TRUE)

[Package xgboost version 0.90.0.2 Index]