LightGBM, Light Gradient Boosting Machine

LightGBM is a gradient boosting framework that uses tree based learning algorithms. It is designed to be distributed and efficient with the following advantages:

• Faster training speed and higher efficiency
• Lower memory usage
• Better accuracy
• Parallel and GPU learning supported
• Capable of handling large-scale data

For more details, please refer to Features.

Comparison experiments on public datasets show that LightGBM can outperform existing boosting frameworks on both efficiency and accuracy, with significantly lower memory consumption. What's more, the parallel experiments show that LightGBM can achieve a linear speed-up by using multiple machines for training in specific settings.

News

08/15/2017 : Optimal split for categorical features.

07/13/2017 : Gitter is avaiable.

06/20/2017 : Python-package is on PyPI now.

06/09/2017 : LightGBM Slack team is available.

05/03/2017 : LightGBM v2 stable release.

04/10/2017 : LightGBM supports GPU-accelerated tree learning now. Please read our GPU Tutorial and Performance Comparison.

02/20/2017 : Update to LightGBM v2.

02/12/2017: LightGBM v1 stable release.

01/08/2017 : Release R-package beta version, welcome to have a try and provide feedback.

12/05/2016 : Categorical Features as input directly (without one-hot coding).

12/02/2016 : Release Python-package beta version, welcome to have a try and provide feedback.

More detailed update logs : Key Events.

External (unofficial) Repositories

Julia Package: https://github.com/Allardvm/LightGBM.jl

JPMML: https://github.com/jpmml/jpmml-lightgbm

Get Started and Documentation

Install by following the guide for the command line program, Python-package or R-package. Then please see the Quick Start guide.

Our primary documentation is at https://lightgbm.readthedocs.io/ and is generated from this repository.

Next you may want to read:

• Examples showing command line usage of common tasks
• Features and algorithms supported by LightGBM
• Parameters is an exhaustive list of customization you can make
• Parallel Learning and GPU Learning can speed up computation
• Laurae++ interactive documentation is a detailed guide for hyperparameters

Documentation for contributors:

• How we update readthedocs.io
• Check out the Development Guide.

Support

• Ask a question on Stack Overflow with the lightgbm tag, we monitor this for new questions.
• Discuss on the LightGBM Gitter.
• Discuss on the LightGBM Slack team.
  • Use this invite link to join the team.
• Open bug reports and feature requests (not questions) on GitHub issues.

How to Contribute

LightGBM has been developed and used by many active community members. Your help is very valuable to make it better for everyone.

• Check out call for contributions to see what can be improved, or open an issue if you want something.
• Contribute to the tests to make it more reliable.
• Contribute to the documents to make it clearer for everyone.
• Contribute to the examples to share your experience with other users.
• Open issue if you met problems during development.

Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Reference Paper

Guolin Ke, Qi Meng, Thomas Finley, Taifeng Wang, Wei Chen, Weidong Ma, Qiwei Ye, and Tie-Yan Liu. LightGBM: A Highly Efficient Gradient Boosting Decision Tree. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 3149-3157. 2017.