Gradient Boosted Trees for Classification Explained

With video explanation | Data Series | Episode 11.7

Gradient boosted trees for classification uses ideas explained in logistic regression and gradient boosted trees for regression. Please consider reading episode 7.1 — logistic regression explained and episode 11.5-gradient boosted trees for regression explained before continuing.

Building Gradient Boosted Trees for Classification

To understand how gradient boosted trees for classification works, let us go through an example step-by-step.

Take a look at the following data sample extracted from a dataset that looks at heart disease risk.

• age : The person’s age in years
• thalchh: Maximum heart rate of the person
• target: Heart disease diagnosis

Note: Here, diagnosis of heart disease is defined as
> 50% diameter narrowing of a major blood vessel

• Usually we train gradient boosted trees on large datasets with many features