.. DO NOT EDIT. .. THIS FILE WAS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED BY SPHINX-GALLERY. .. TO MAKE CHANGES, EDIT THE SOURCE PYTHON FILE: .. "auto_examples/ensemble/plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.py" .. LINE NUMBERS ARE GIVEN BELOW. .. only:: html .. note:: :class: sphx-glr-download-link-note :ref:`Go to the end ` to download the full example code or to run this example in your browser via JupyterLite or Binder .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-example-title .. _sphx_glr_auto_examples_ensemble_plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.py: =================================== Early stopping in Gradient Boosting =================================== Gradient Boosting is an ensemble technique that combines multiple weak learners, typically decision trees, to create a robust and powerful predictive model. It does so in an iterative fashion, where each new stage (tree) corrects the errors of the previous ones. Early stopping is a technique in Gradient Boosting that allows us to find the optimal number of iterations required to build a model that generalizes well to unseen data and avoids overfitting. The concept is simple: we set aside a portion of our dataset as a validation set (specified using `validation_fraction`) to assess the model's performance during training. As the model is iteratively built with additional stages (trees), its performance on the validation set is monitored as a function of the number of steps. Early stopping becomes effective when the model's performance on the validation set plateaus or worsens (within deviations specified by `tol`) over a certain number of consecutive stages (specified by `n_iter_no_change`). This signals that the model has reached a point where further iterations may lead to overfitting, and it's time to stop training. The number of estimators (trees) in the final model, when early stopping is applied, can be accessed using the `n_estimators_` attribute. Overall, early stopping is a valuable tool to strike a balance between model performance and efficiency in gradient boosting. License: BSD 3 clause .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 36-41 Data Preparation ---------------- First we load and prepares the California Housing Prices dataset for training and evaluation. It subsets the dataset, splits it into training and validation sets. .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 41-56 .. code-block:: Python import time import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from sklearn.datasets import fetch_california_housing from sklearn.ensemble import GradientBoostingRegressor from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split data = fetch_california_housing() X, y = data.data[:600], data.target[:600] X_train, X_val, y_train, y_val = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2, random_state=42) .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 57-63 Model Training and Comparison ----------------------------- Two :class:`~sklearn.ensemble.GradientBoostingRegressor` models are trained: one with and another without early stopping. The purpose is to compare their performance. It also calculates the training time and the `n_estimators_` used by both models. .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 63-83 .. code-block:: Python params = dict(n_estimators=1000, max_depth=5, learning_rate=0.1, random_state=42) gbm_full = GradientBoostingRegressor(**params) gbm_early_stopping = GradientBoostingRegressor( **params, validation_fraction=0.1, n_iter_no_change=10, ) start_time = time.time() gbm_full.fit(X_train, y_train) training_time_full = time.time() - start_time n_estimators_full = gbm_full.n_estimators_ start_time = time.time() gbm_early_stopping.fit(X_train, y_train) training_time_early_stopping = time.time() - start_time estimators_early_stopping = gbm_early_stopping.n_estimators_ .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 84-90 Error Calculation ----------------- The code calculates the :func:`~sklearn.metrics.mean_squared_error` for both training and validation datasets for the models trained in the previous section. It computes the errors for each boosting iteration. The purpose is to assess the performance and convergence of the models. .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 90-115 .. code-block:: Python train_errors_without = [] val_errors_without = [] train_errors_with = [] val_errors_with = [] for i, (train_pred, val_pred) in enumerate( zip( gbm_full.staged_predict(X_train), gbm_full.staged_predict(X_val), ) ): train_errors_without.append(mean_squared_error(y_train, train_pred)) val_errors_without.append(mean_squared_error(y_val, val_pred)) for i, (train_pred, val_pred) in enumerate( zip( gbm_early_stopping.staged_predict(X_train), gbm_early_stopping.staged_predict(X_val), ) ): train_errors_with.append(mean_squared_error(y_train, train_pred)) val_errors_with.append(mean_squared_error(y_val, val_pred)) .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 116-125 Visualize Comparison -------------------- It includes three subplots: 1. Plotting training errors of both models over boosting iterations. 2. Plotting validation errors of both models over boosting iterations. 3. Creating a bar chart to compare the training times and the estimator used of the models with and without early stopping. .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 125-162 .. code-block:: Python fig, axes = plt.subplots(ncols=3, figsize=(12, 4)) axes[0].plot(train_errors_without, label="gbm_full") axes[0].plot(train_errors_with, label="gbm_early_stopping") axes[0].set_xlabel("Boosting Iterations") axes[0].set_ylabel("MSE (Training)") axes[0].set_yscale("log") axes[0].legend() axes[0].set_title("Training Error") axes[1].plot(val_errors_without, label="gbm_full") axes[1].plot(val_errors_with, label="gbm_early_stopping") axes[1].set_xlabel("Boosting Iterations") axes[1].set_ylabel("MSE (Validation)") axes[1].set_yscale("log") axes[1].legend() axes[1].set_title("Validation Error") training_times = [training_time_full, training_time_early_stopping] labels = ["gbm_full", "gbm_early_stopping"] bars = axes[2].bar(labels, training_times) axes[2].set_ylabel("Training Time (s)") for bar, n_estimators in zip(bars, [n_estimators_full, estimators_early_stopping]): height = bar.get_height() axes[2].text( bar.get_x() + bar.get_width() / 2, height + 0.001, f"Estimators: {n_estimators}", ha="center", va="bottom", ) plt.tight_layout() plt.show() .. image-sg:: /auto_examples/ensemble/images/sphx_glr_plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping_001.png :alt: Training Error, Validation Error :srcset: /auto_examples/ensemble/images/sphx_glr_plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping_001.png :class: sphx-glr-single-img .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 163-167 The difference in training error between the `gbm_full` and the `gbm_early_stopping` stems from the fact that `gbm_early_stopping` sets aside `validation_fraction` of the training data as internal validation set. Early stopping is decided based on this internal validation score. .. GENERATED FROM PYTHON SOURCE LINES 169-183 Summary ------- In our example with the :class:`~sklearn.ensemble.GradientBoostingRegressor` model on the California Housing Prices dataset, we have demonstrated the practical benefits of early stopping: - **Preventing Overfitting:** We showed how the validation error stabilizes or starts to increase after a certain point, indicating that the model generalizes better to unseen data. This is achieved by stopping the training process before overfitting occurs. - **Improving Training Efficiency:** We compared training times between models with and without early stopping. The model with early stopping achieved comparable accuracy while requiring significantly fewer estimators, resulting in faster training. .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-timing **Total running time of the script:** (0 minutes 3.301 seconds) .. _sphx_glr_download_auto_examples_ensemble_plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.py: .. only:: html .. container:: sphx-glr-footer sphx-glr-footer-example .. container:: binder-badge .. image:: images/binder_badge_logo.svg :target: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/main?urlpath=lab/tree/notebooks/auto_examples/ensemble/plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.ipynb :alt: Launch binder :width: 150 px .. container:: lite-badge .. image:: images/jupyterlite_badge_logo.svg :target: ../../lite/lab/?path=auto_examples/ensemble/plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.ipynb :alt: Launch JupyterLite :width: 150 px .. container:: sphx-glr-download sphx-glr-download-jupyter :download:`Download Jupyter notebook: plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.ipynb ` .. container:: sphx-glr-download sphx-glr-download-python :download:`Download Python source code: plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.py ` .. include:: plot_gradient_boosting_early_stopping.recommendations .. only:: html .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-signature `Gallery generated by Sphinx-Gallery `_