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.
  • Support of parallel, distributed, and GPU learning.
  • Capable of handling large-scale data.
  • For further details, please refer to Features .

    Benefiting from these advantages, LightGBM is being widely-used in many winning solutions of machine learning competitions.

    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, distributed learning experiments show that LightGBM can achieve a linear speed-up by using multiple machines for training in specific settings.

    Get Started and Documentation

    Our primary documentation is at https://lightgbm.readthedocs.io/ and is generated from this repository. If you are new to LightGBM, follow the installation instructions on that site.

    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.
  • Distributed Learning and GPU Learning can speed up computation.
  • FLAML provides automated tuning for LightGBM ( code examples ).
  • Optuna Hyperparameter Tuner provides automated tuning for LightGBM hyperparameters ( code examples ).
  • Understanding LightGBM Parameters (and How to Tune Them using Neptune) .
  • Documentation for contributors:

  • How we update readthedocs.io .
  • Check out the Development Guide .
  • Please refer to changelogs at GitHub releases page.

    External (Unofficial) Repositories

    Projects listed here offer alternative ways to use LightGBM. They are not maintained or officially endorsed by the LightGBM development team.

    LightGBMLSS (An extension of LightGBM to probabilistic modelling from which prediction intervals and quantiles can be derived): https://github.com/StatMixedML/LightGBMLSS

    FLAML (AutoML library for hyperparameter optimization): https://github.com/microsoft/FLAML

    supertree (interactive visualization of decision trees): https://github.com/mljar/supertree

    Optuna (hyperparameter optimization framework): https://github.com/optuna/optuna

    Julia-package: https://github.com/IQVIA-ML/LightGBM.jl

    JPMML (Java PMML converter): https://github.com/jpmml/jpmml-lightgbm

    Nyoka (Python PMML converter): https://github.com/SoftwareAG/nyoka

    Treelite (model compiler for efficient deployment): https://github.com/dmlc/treelite

    lleaves (LLVM-based model compiler for efficient inference): https://github.com/siboehm/lleaves

    Hummingbird (model compiler into tensor computations): https://github.com/microsoft/hummingbird

    cuML Forest Inference Library (GPU-accelerated inference): https://github.com/rapidsai/cuml

    daal4py (Intel CPU-accelerated inference): https://github.com/intel/scikit-learn-intelex/tree/master/daal4py

    m2cgen (model appliers for various languages): https://github.com/BayesWitnesses/m2cgen

    leaves (Go model applier): https://github.com/dmitryikh/leaves

    ONNXMLTools (ONNX converter): https://github.com/onnx/onnxmltools

    SHAP (model output explainer): https://github.com/slundberg/shap

    Shapash (model visualization and interpretation): https://github.com/MAIF/shapash

    dtreeviz (decision tree visualization and model interpretation): https://github.com/parrt/dtreeviz

    SynapseML (LightGBM on Spark): https://github.com/microsoft/SynapseML

    Kubeflow Fairing (LightGBM on Kubernetes): https://github.com/kubeflow/fairing

    Kubeflow Operator (LightGBM on Kubernetes): https://github.com/kubeflow/xgboost-operator

    lightgbm_ray (LightGBM on Ray): https://github.com/ray-project/lightgbm_ray

    Mars (LightGBM on Mars): https://github.com/mars-project/mars

    ML.NET (.NET/C#-package): https://github.com/dotnet/machinelearning

    LightGBM.NET (.NET/C#-package): https://github.com/rca22/LightGBM.Net

    Ruby gem: https://github.com/ankane/lightgbm-ruby

    LightGBM4j (Java high-level binding): https://github.com/metarank/lightgbm4j

    lightgbm3 (Rust binding): https://github.com/Mottl/lightgbm3-rs

    MLflow (experiment tracking, model monitoring framework): https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow

    {bonsai} (R {parsnip} -compliant interface): https://github.com/tidymodels/bonsai

    {mlr3extralearners} (R {mlr3} -compliant interface): https://github.com/mlr-org/mlr3extralearners

    lightgbm-transform (feature transformation binding): https://github.com/microsoft/lightgbm-transform

    postgresml (LightGBM training and prediction in SQL, via a Postgres extension): https://github.com/postgresml/postgresml

    vaex-ml (Python DataFrame library with its own interface to LightGBM): https://github.com/vaexio/vaex

    Support

  • Ask a question on Stack Overflow with the lightgbm tag , we monitor this for new questions.
  • Open bug reports and feature requests on GitHub issues .
  • How to Contribute

    Check CONTRIBUTING page.

    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 [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

    Reference Papers

    Yu Shi, Guolin Ke, Zhuoming Chen, Shuxin Zheng, Tie-Yan Liu. "Quantized Training of Gradient Boosting Decision Trees" ( link ). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022), pp. 18822-18833.

    Guolin Ke, Qi Meng, Thomas Finley, Taifeng Wang, Wei Chen, Weidong Ma, Qiwei Ye, Tie-Yan Liu. " LightGBM: A Highly Efficient Gradient Boosting Decision Tree ". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017), pp. 3149-3157.

    Qi Meng, Guolin Ke, Taifeng Wang, Wei Chen, Qiwei Ye, Zhi-Ming Ma, Tie-Yan Liu. " A Communication-Efficient Parallel Algorithm for Decision Tree ". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016), pp. 1279-1287.

    Huan Zhang, Si Si and Cho-Jui Hsieh. " GPU Acceleration for Large-scale Tree Boosting ". SysML Conference, 2018.

    License

    This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for additional details.