This file records the changes in xgboost library in reverse chronological order.
v1.7.0 (2022 Oct 20)
We are excited to announce the feature packed XGBoost 1.7 release. The release note will walk through some of the major new features first, then make a summary for other improvements and language-binding-specific changes.
PySpark
XGBoost 1.7 features initial support for PySpark integration. The new interface is adapted from the existing PySpark XGBoost interface developed by databricks with additional features like QuantileDMatrix and the rapidsai plugin (GPU pipeline) support. The new Spark XGBoost Python estimators not only benefit from PySpark ml facilities for powerful distributed computing but also enjoy the rest of the Python ecosystem. Users can define a custom objective, callbacks, and metrics in Python and use them with this interface on distributed clusters. The support is labeled as experimental with more features to come in future releases. For a brief introduction please visit the tutorial on XGBoost's document page. (#8355, #8344, #8335, #8284, #8271, #8283, #8250, #8231, #8219, #8245, #8217, #8200, #8173, #8172, #8145, #8117, #8131, #8088, #8082, #8085, #8066, #8068, #8067, #8020, #8385)
Due to its initial support status, the new interface has some limitations; categorical features and multi-output models are not yet supported.
Development of categorical data support
More progress on the experimental support for categorical features. In 1.7, XGBoost can handle missing values in categorical features and features a new parameter max_cat_threshold, which limits the number of categories that can be used in the split evaluation. The parameter is enabled when the partitioning algorithm is used and helps prevent over-fitting. Also, the sklearn interface can now accept the feature_types parameter to use data types other than dataframe for categorical features. (#8280, #7821, #8285, #8080, #7948, #7858, #7853, #8212, #7957, #7937, #7934)
Experimental support for federated learning and new communication collective
An exciting addition to XGBoost is the experimental federated learning support. The federated learning is implemented with a gRPC federated server that aggregates allreduce calls, and federated clients that train on local data and use existing tree methods (approx, hist, gpu_hist). Currently, this only supports horizontal federated learning (samples are split across participants, and each participant has all the features and labels). Future plans include vertical federated learning (features split across participants), and stronger privacy guarantees with homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. See Demo with NVFlare integration for example usage with nvflare.
As part of the work, XGBoost 1.7 has replaced the old rabit module with the new collective module as the network communication interface with added support for runtime backend selection. In previous versions, the backend is defined at compile time and can not be changed once built. In this new release, users can choose between rabit and federated. (#8029, #8351, #8350, #8342, #8340, #8325, #8279, #8181, #8027, #7958, #7831, #7879, #8257, #8316, #8242, #8057, #8203, #8038, #7965, #7930, #7911)
The feature is available in the public PyPI binary package for testing.
Quantile DMatrix
Before 1.7, XGBoost has an internal data structure called DeviceQuantileDMatrix (and its distributed version). We now extend its support to CPU and renamed it to QuantileDMatrix. This data structure is used for optimizing memory usage for the hist and gpu_hist tree methods. The new feature helps reduce CPU memory usage significantly, especially for dense data. The new QuantileDMatrix can be initialized from both CPU and GPU data, and regardless of where the data comes from, the constructed instance can be used by both the CPU algorithm and GPU algorithm including training and prediction (with some overhead of conversion if the device of data and training algorithm doesn't match). Also, a new parameter ref is added to QuantileDMatrix, which can be used to construct validation/test datasets. Lastly, it's set as default in the scikit-learn interface when a supported tree method is specified by users. (#7889, #7923, #8136, #8215, #8284, #8268, #8220, #8346, #8327, #8130, #8116, #8103, #8094, #8086, #7898, #8060, #8019, #8045, #7901, #7912, #7922)
Mean absolute error
The mean absolute error is a new member of the collection of objectives in XGBoost. It's noteworthy since MAE has zero hessian value, which is unusual to XGBoost as XGBoost relies on Newton optimization. Without valid Hessian values, the convergence speed can be slow. As part of the support for MAE, we added line searches into the XGBoost training algorithm to overcome the difficulty of training without valid Hessian values. In the future, we will extend the line search to other objectives where it's appropriate for faster convergence speed. (#8343, #8107, #7812, #8380)
XGBoost on Browser
With the help of the pyodide project, you can now run XGBoost on browsers. (#7954, #8369)
Experimental IPv6 Support for Dask
With the growing adaption of the new internet protocol, XGBoost joined the club. In the latest release, the Dask interface can be used on IPv6 clusters, see XGBoost's Dask tutorial for details. (#8225, #8234)
Optimizations
We have new optimizations for both the hist and gpu_hist tree methods to make XGBoost's training even more efficient.
Hist
Hist now supports optional by-column histogram build, which is automatically configured based on various conditions of input data. This helps the XGBoost CPU hist algorithm to scale better with different shapes of training datasets. (#8233, #8259). Also, the build histogram kernel now can better utilize CPU registers (#8218)
GPU Hist
GPU hist performance is significantly improved for wide datasets. GPU hist now supports batched node build, which reduces kernel latency and increases throughput. The improvement is particularly significant when growing deep trees with the default depthwise policy. (#7919, #8073, #8051, #8118, #7867, #7964, #8026)
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Updates the requirements on xgboost to permit the latest version.
Release notes
Sourced from xgboost's releases.
Changelog
Sourced from xgboost's changelog.
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Commits
534c940
Release 1.7.1 (#8413)5b76acc
Add back xgboost.rabit for backwards compatibility (#8408) (#8411)4bc59ef
Release 1.7e43cd60
[backport] Type fix for WebAssembly. (#8369) (#8394)3f92970
[backport] Fix CUDA async stream. (#8380) (#8392)e17f701
[backport][doc] Cleanup outdated documents for GPU. [skip ci] (#8378) (#8393)aa30ce1
[backport][pyspark] Improve tutorial on enabling GPU support. (#8385) [skip c...153d995
Fix building XGBoost with libomp 15 (#8384) (#8387)463313d
Remove cleanup script in R package. (#8370)7cf58a2
Make 1.7.0rc1. (#8365)Dependabot will resolve any conflicts with this PR as long as you don't alter it yourself. You can also trigger a rebase manually by commenting
@dependabot rebase
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