28Apr 2021 by Andrew Treadway
How to plot XGBoost trees in R

How to plot XGBoost trees in R

Machine Learning, R
In this post, we're going to cover how to plot XGBoost trees in R. XGBoost is a very popular machine learning algorithm, which is frequently used in Kaggle competitions and has many practical use cases. Let's start by loading the packages we'll need. Note that plotting XGBoost trees requires the DiagrammeR package to be installed, so even if you have xgboost installed already, you'll need to make sure you have DiagrammeR also. [code lang="R"] # load libraries library(xgboost) library(caret) library(dplyr) library(DiagrammeR) [/code] Next, let's read in our dataset. In this post, we'll be using this customer churn dataset. The label we'll be trying to predict is called "Exited" and is a binary variable with 1 meaning the customer churned (canceled account) vs. 0 meaning the customer did not churn (did…
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14Apr 2021 by Andrew Treadway
Python collections tutorial

Python collections tutorial

Python
In this post, we'll discuss the underrated Python collections package, which is part of the standard library. Collections allows you to utilize several data structures beyond base Python. How to get a count of all the elements in a list One very useful function in collections is the Counter method, which you can use to return a count of all the elements in a list. [code lang="python"] nums = [3, 3, 4, 1, 10, 10, 10, 10, 5] collections.Counter(nums) [/code] The Counter object that gets returned is also modifiable. Let's define a variable equal to the result above. [code lang="python"] counts = collections.Counter(nums) counts[20] += 1 [/code] Notice how we can add the number 20 to our Counter object without having to initialize it with a 0 value. Counter can…
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