Review of grid search and random search

Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost

Sergey Fogelson

Head of Data Science, TelevisaUnivision

Grid search: review

Search exhaustively over a given set of hyperparameters, once per set of hyperparameters
Number of models = number of distinct values per hyperparameter multiplied across each hyperparameter
Pick final model hyperparameter values that give best cross-validated evaluation metric value

Grid search: example

import pandas as pd
import xgboost as xgb
import numpy as np
from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV

housing_data = pd.read_csv("ames_housing_trimmed_processed.csv")
X, y = housing_data[housing_data.columns.tolist()[:-1]], 
       housing_data[housing_data.columns.tolist()[-1]
housing_dmatrix = xgb.DMatrix(data=X,label=y)

gbm_param_grid = {'learning_rate': [0.01,0.1,0.5,0.9],
                  'n_estimators': [200],
                  'subsample': [0.3, 0.5, 0.9]}

gbm = xgb.XGBRegressor()
grid_mse = GridSearchCV(estimator=gbm,param_grid=gbm_param_grid, 
            scoring='neg_mean_squared_error', cv=4, verbose=1)
grid_mse.fit(X, y)

print("Best parameters found: ",grid_mse.best_params_)
print("Lowest RMSE found: ", np.sqrt(np.abs(grid_mse.best_score_)))

Best parameters found: {'learning_rate': 0.1, 
'n_estimators': 200, 'subsample': 0.5}
Lowest RMSE found:  28530.1829341

Random search: review

Create a (possibly infinite) range of hyperparameter values per hyperparameter that you would like to search over
Set the number of iterations you would like for the random search to continue
During each iteration, randomly draw a value in the range of specified values for each hyperparameter searched over and train/evaluate a model with those hyperparameters
After you've reached the maximum number of iterations, select the hyperparameter configuration with the best evaluated score

Random search: example

import pandas as pd
import xgboost as xgb
import numpy as np
from sklearn.model_selection import RandomizedSearchCV
housing_data = pd.read_csv("ames_housing_trimmed_processed.csv")
X,y = housing_data[housing_data.columns.tolist()[:-1]],
      housing_data[housing_data.columns.tolist()[-1]]
housing_dmatrix = xgb.DMatrix(data=X,label=y)

gbm_param_grid = {'learning_rate': np.arange(0.05,1.05,.05),
                  'n_estimators': [200],
                  'subsample': np.arange(0.05,1.05,.05)}

gbm = xgb.XGBRegressor()
randomized_mse = RandomizedSearchCV(estimator=gbm, param_distributions=gbm_param_grid, 
                        n_iter=25, scoring='neg_mean_squared_error', cv=4, verbose=1)
randomized_mse.fit(X, y)

print("Best parameters found: ",randomized_mse.best_params_)
print("Lowest RMSE found: ", np.sqrt(np.abs(randomized_mse.best_score_)))

Best parameters found: {'subsample': 0.60000000000000009,
'n_estimators': 200, 'learning_rate': 0.20000000000000001}
Lowest RMSE found: 28300.2374291

Let's practice!

Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost