xgb.importance: Feature importance

In xgboost: Extreme Gradient Boosting

Feature importance

Description

Creates a data.table of feature importances.

Usage

xgb.importance(
  model = NULL,
  feature_names = getinfo(model, "feature_name"),
  trees = NULL
)

Arguments

model	Object of class xgb.Booster.
feature_names	Character vector used to overwrite the feature names of the model. The default is NULL (use original feature names).
trees	An integer vector of (base-1) tree indices that should be included into the importance calculation (only for the "gbtree" booster). The default (NULL) parses all trees. It could be useful, e.g., in multiclass classification to get feature importances for each class separately.

Details

This function works for both linear and tree models.

For linear models, the importance is the absolute magnitude of linear coefficients. To obtain a meaningful ranking by importance for linear models, the features need to be on the same scale (which is also recommended when using L1 or L2 regularization).

Value

A data.table with the following columns:

For a tree model:

• Features: Names of the features used in the model.

• Gain: Fractional contribution of each feature to the model based on the total gain of this feature's splits. Higher percentage means higher importance.

• Cover: Metric of the number of observation related to this feature.

• Frequency: Percentage of times a feature has been used in trees.

For a linear model:

• Features: Names of the features used in the model.

• Weight: Linear coefficient of this feature.

• Class: Class label (only for multiclass models). For objects of class xgboost (as produced by xgboost()), it will be a factor, while for objects of class xgb.Booster (as produced by xgb.train()), it will be a zero-based integer vector.

If feature_names is not provided and model doesn't have feature_names, the index of the features will be used instead. Because the index is extracted from the model dump (based on C++ code), it starts at 0 (as in C/C++ or Python) instead of 1 (usual in R).

Examples

# binary classification using "gbtree":
data("ToothGrowth")
x <- ToothGrowth[, c("len", "dose")]
y <- ToothGrowth$supp
model_tree_binary <- xgboost(
  x, y,
  nrounds = 5L,
  nthreads = 1L,
  booster = "gbtree",
  max_depth = 2L
)
xgb.importance(model_tree_binary)

# binary classification using "gblinear":
model_tree_linear <- xgboost(
  x, y,
  nrounds = 5L,
  nthreads = 1L,
  booster = "gblinear",
  learning_rate = 0.3
)
xgb.importance(model_tree_linear)

# multi-class classification using "gbtree":
data("iris")
x <- iris[, c("Sepal.Length", "Sepal.Width", "Petal.Length", "Petal.Width")]
y <- iris$Species
model_tree_multi <- xgboost(
  x, y,
  nrounds = 5L,
  nthreads = 1L,
  booster = "gbtree",
  max_depth = 3
)
# all classes clumped together:
xgb.importance(model_tree_multi)
# inspect importances separately for each class:
num_classes <- 3L
nrounds <- 5L
xgb.importance(
  model_tree_multi, trees = seq(from = 1, by = num_classes, length.out = nrounds)
)
xgb.importance(
  model_tree_multi, trees = seq(from = 2, by = num_classes, length.out = nrounds)
)
xgb.importance(
  model_tree_multi, trees = seq(from = 3, by = num_classes, length.out = nrounds)
)

# multi-class classification using "gblinear":
model_linear_multi <- xgboost(
  x, y,
  nrounds = 5L,
  nthreads = 1L,
  booster = "gblinear",
  learning_rate = 0.2
)
xgb.importance(model_linear_multi)

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