Peter Prettenhofer – Gradient Boosted Regression Timber in scikit-learn

http://www.slideshare.net/PyData/gradient-boosted-regression-trees-in-scikit-learn-gilles-louppe

This talk describes Gradient Boosted Regression Trees (GBRT), a powerful statistical learning technique with applications in a variety of areas, ranging from web page ranking to environmental niche modeling. GBRT is a key ingredient of many winning solutions in data-mining competitions such as the Netflix Prize, the GE Flight Quest, or the Heritage Health Price.

I will give a brief introduction to the GBRT model and regression trees — focusing on intuition rather than mathematical formulas. The majority of the talk will be dedicated to an in depth discussion how to apply GBRT in practice using scikit-learn. We will cover important topics such as regularization, model tuning and model interpretation that should significantly improve your score on Kaggle.

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