Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM): from Zero to Hero (with R and Python code)
Details
Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM): from Zero to Hero (with R and Python code)
Szilard Pafka, PhD
Chief Scientist, Epoch
This talk will get you started with gradient boosting machines (GBM), a
very popular machine learning technique providing state-of-the-art
accuracy on numerous business prediction problems. After a quick intro
to machine learning and the GBM algorithm, I will show how easy it is to
train and then use GBMs in real-life business applications using some
the most popular open source implementations (xgboost, lightgbm and
h2o). We’ll do all this in both R and Python with only a few lines of
code and this talk will be accessible for a wide audience (with limited
prior knowledge of machine learning). Finally, in the last part of the
talk I will provide plenty of references that can get you to the next
level. GBMs are a powerful technique to have in your machine learning
toolbox, because despite all the latest hype about deep learning (neural
nets) and “AI”, in fact GBMs usually outperform neural networks on
structured/tabular data most often encountered in business applications.
Bio:
Szilard studied Physics in the 90s and obtained a PhD by using statistical methods to analyze the risk of financial portfolios. He worked in finance, then more than a decade ago moved to become the Chief Scientist of a tech company in Santa Monica doing everything data (analysis, modeling, data visualization, machine learning, data infrastructure etc). He is the founder/organizer of several meetups in the Los Angeles area (R, data science etc) and the data science community website datascience.la. He is the author of a well-known machine learning benchmark on github (1000+ stars), a frequent speaker at conferences (keynote/invited at KDD, R-finance, Crunch, eRum and contributed at useR!, PAW, EARL, H2O World, Data Science Pop-up, Dataworks Summit etc.), and he has developed and taught graduate data science and machine learning courses as a visiting professor at two universities (UCLA and CEU in Europe).
Timeline:
– 6:00pm arrival, snacks+drinks (non-alchoholic) and networking
– 7:00pm talk start
You must have a confirmed ("Yes") RSVP and please arrive by 6:55pm the latest.
Venue:
Core Digital Media
12181 Bluff Creek Dr #250 · Playa Vista, CA