Topic summary

Gradient boosted trees

Gradient boosted trees

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Gradient boosting.

Complexity penalty

Another useful regularization technique for gradient boosted model is to penalize its complexity. For gradient boosted trees, model complexity can be defined as the proportional number of leaves in the trees. The joint optimization of loss and model complexity corresponds to a post-pruning algorithm to remove branches that fail to reduce the loss by a threshold.