xgb.DMatrix: Construct xgb.DMatrix object

In xgboost: Extreme Gradient Boosting

Construct xgb.DMatrix object

Description

Construct an 'xgb.DMatrix' object from a given data source, which can then be passed to functions such as xgb.train() or predict().

Usage

xgb.DMatrix(
  data,
  label = NULL,
  weight = NULL,
  base_margin = NULL,
  missing = NA,
  silent = FALSE,
  feature_names = colnames(data),
  feature_types = NULL,
  nthread = NULL,
  group = NULL,
  qid = NULL,
  label_lower_bound = NULL,
  label_upper_bound = NULL,
  feature_weights = NULL,
  data_split_mode = "row",
  ...
)

xgb.QuantileDMatrix(
  data,
  label = NULL,
  weight = NULL,
  base_margin = NULL,
  missing = NA,
  feature_names = colnames(data),
  feature_types = NULL,
  nthread = NULL,
  group = NULL,
  qid = NULL,
  label_lower_bound = NULL,
  label_upper_bound = NULL,
  feature_weights = NULL,
  ref = NULL,
  max_bin = NULL
)

Arguments

data	Data from which to create a DMatrix, which can then be used for fitting models or for getting predictions out of a fitted model. Supported input types are as follows: matrix objects, with types numeric, integer, or logical. data.frame objects, with columns of types numeric, integer, logical, or factor Note that xgboost uses base-0 encoding for categorical types, hence factor types (which use base-1 encoding') will be converted inside the function call. Be aware that the encoding used for factor types is not kept as part of the model, so in subsequent calls to predict, it is the user's responsibility to ensure that factor columns have the same levels as the ones from which the DMatrix was constructed. Other column types are not supported. CSR matrices, as class dgRMatrix from package Matrix. CSC matrices, as class dgCMatrix from package Matrix. These are not supported by xgb.QuantileDMatrix. XGBoost's own binary format for DMatrices, as produced by xgb.DMatrix.save(). Single-row CSR matrices, as class dsparseVector from package Matrix, which is interpreted as a single row (only when making predictions from a fitted model).
label	Label of the training data. For classification problems, should be passed encoded as integers with numeration starting at zero.
weight	Weight for each instance. Note that, for ranking task, weights are per-group. In ranking task, one weight is assigned to each group (not each data point). This is because we only care about the relative ordering of data points within each group, so it doesn't make sense to assign weights to individual data points.
base_margin	Base margin used for boosting from existing model. In the case of multi-output models, one can also pass multi-dimensional base_margin.
missing	A float value to represents missing values in data (not used when creating DMatrix from text files). It is useful to change when a zero, infinite, or some other extreme value represents missing values in data.
silent	whether to suppress printing an informational message after loading from a file.
feature_names	Set names for features. Overrides column names in data frame and matrix. Note: columns are not referenced by name when calling predict, so the column order there must be the same as in the DMatrix construction, regardless of the column names.
feature_types	Set types for features. If data is a data.frame and passing feature_types is not supplied, feature types will be deduced automatically from the column types. Otherwise, one can pass a character vector with the same length as number of columns in data, with the following possible values: "c", which represents categorical columns. "q", which represents numeric columns. "int", which represents integer columns. "i", which represents logical (boolean) columns. Note that, while categorical types are treated differently from the rest for model fitting purposes, the other types do not influence the generated model, but have effects in other functionalities such as feature importances. Important: Categorical features, if specified manually through feature_types, must be encoded as integers with numeration starting at zero, and the same encoding needs to be applied when passing data to predict(). Even if passing factor types, the encoding will not be saved, so make sure that factor columns passed to predict have the same levels.
nthread	Number of threads used for creating DMatrix.
group	Group size for all ranking group.
qid	Query ID for data samples, used for ranking.
label_lower_bound	Lower bound for survival training.
label_upper_bound	Upper bound for survival training.
feature_weights	Set feature weights for column sampling.
data_split_mode	Not used yet. This parameter is for distributed training, which is not yet available for the R package.
...	Not used. Some arguments that were part of this function in previous XGBoost versions are currently deprecated or have been renamed. If a deprecated or renamed argument is passed, will throw a warning (by default) and use its current equivalent instead. This warning will become an error if using the 'strict mode' option. If some additional argument is passed that is neither a current function argument nor a deprecated or renamed argument, a warning or error will be thrown depending on the 'strict mode' option. Important: ... will be removed in a future version, and all the current deprecation warnings will become errors. Please use only arguments that form part of the function signature.
ref	The training dataset that provides quantile information, needed when creating validation/test dataset with xgb.QuantileDMatrix(). Supplying the training DMatrix as a reference means that the same quantisation applied to the training data is applied to the validation/test data
max_bin	The number of histogram bin, should be consistent with the training parameter max_bin. This is only supported when constructing a QuantileDMatrix.

Details

Function xgb.QuantileDMatrix() will construct a DMatrix with quantization for the histogram method already applied to it, which can be used to reduce memory usage (compared to using a a regular DMatrix first and then creating a quantization out of it) when using the histogram method (tree_method = "hist", which is the default algorithm), but is not usable for the sorted-indices method (tree_method = "exact"), nor for the approximate method (tree_method = "approx").

Note that DMatrix objects are not serializable through R functions such as saveRDS() or save(). If a DMatrix gets serialized and then de-serialized (for example, when saving data in an R session or caching chunks in an Rmd file), the resulting object will not be usable anymore and will need to be reconstructed from the original source of data.

Value

An 'xgb.DMatrix' object. If calling xgb.QuantileDMatrix, it will have additional subclass xgb.QuantileDMatrix.

Examples

data(agaricus.train, package = "xgboost")

## Keep the number of threads to 1 for examples
nthread <- 1
data.table::setDTthreads(nthread)
dtrain <- with(
  agaricus.train, xgb.DMatrix(data, label = label, nthread = nthread)
)
fname <- file.path(tempdir(), "xgb.DMatrix.data")
xgb.DMatrix.save(dtrain, fname)
dtrain <- xgb.DMatrix(fname, nthread = 1)

xgboost documentation built on Dec. 3, 2025, 5:06 p.m.