xgb.train: Fit XGBoost Model

In xgboost: Extreme Gradient Boosting

Fit XGBoost Model

Description

Fits an XGBoost model to given data in DMatrix format (e.g. as produced by xgb.DMatrix()). See the tutorial Introduction to Boosted Trees for a longer explanation of what XGBoost does, and the rest of the XGBoost Tutorials for further explanations XGBoost's features and usage.

Compared to function xgboost() which is a user-friendly function targeted towards interactive usage, xgb.train is a lower-level interface which allows finer-grained control and exposes further functionalities offered by the core library (such as learning-to-rank objectives), but which works exclusively with XGBoost's own data format ("DMatrices") instead of with regular R objects.

The syntax of this function closely mimics the same function from the Python package for XGBoost, and is recommended to use for package developers over xgboost() as it will provide a more stable interface (with fewer breaking changes) and lower overhead from data validations.

See also the migration guide if coming from a previous version of XGBoost in the 1.x series.

Usage

xgb.train(
  params = xgb.params(),
  data,
  nrounds,
  evals = list(),
  objective = NULL,
  custom_metric = NULL,
  verbose = 1,
  print_every_n = 1L,
  early_stopping_rounds = NULL,
  maximize = NULL,
  save_period = NULL,
  save_name = "xgboost.model",
  xgb_model = NULL,
  callbacks = list(),
  ...
)

Arguments

params	List of XGBoost parameters which control the model building process. See the online documentation and the documentation for xgb.params() for details. Should be passed as list with named entries. Parameters that are not specified in this list will use their default values. A list of named parameters can be created through the function xgb.params(), which accepts all valid parameters as function arguments.
data	Training dataset. xgb.train() accepts only an xgb.DMatrix as the input. Note that there is a function xgboost() which is meant to accept R data objects as inputs, such as data frames and matrices.
nrounds	Max number of boosting iterations.
evals	Named list of xgb.DMatrix datasets to use for evaluating model performance. Metrics specified in either eval_metric (under params) or custom_metric (function argument here) will be computed for each of these datasets during each boosting iteration, and stored in the end as a field named evaluation_log in the resulting object. When either verbose>=1 or xgb.cb.print.evaluation() callback is engaged, the performance results are continuously printed out during the training. E.g., specifying evals=list(validation1=mat1, validation2=mat2) allows to track the performance of each round's model on mat1 and mat2.
objective	Customized objective function. Should take two arguments: the first one will be the current predictions (either a numeric vector or matrix depending on the number of targets / classes), and the second one will be the data DMatrix object that is used for training. It should return a list with two elements grad and hess (in that order), as either numeric vectors or numeric matrices depending on the number of targets / classes (same dimension as the predictions that are passed as first argument).
custom_metric	Customized evaluation function. Just like objective, should take two arguments, with the first one being the predictions and the second one the data DMatrix. Should return a list with two elements metric (name that will be displayed for this metric, should be a string / character), and value (the number that the function calculates, should be a numeric scalar). Note that even if passing custom_metric, objectives also have an associated default metric that will be evaluated in addition to it. In order to disable the built-in metric, one can pass parameter disable_default_eval_metric = TRUE.
verbose	If 0, xgboost will stay silent. If 1, it will print information about performance. If 2, some additional information will be printed out. Note that setting verbose > 0 automatically engages the xgb.cb.print.evaluation(period=1) callback function.
print_every_n	When passing verbose>0, evaluation logs (metrics calculated on the data passed under evals) will be printed every nth iteration according to the value passed here. The first and last iteration are always included regardless of this 'n'. Only has an effect when passing data under evals and when passing verbose>0. The parameter is passed to the xgb.cb.print.evaluation() callback.
early_stopping_rounds	Number of boosting rounds after which training will be stopped if there is no improvement in performance (as measured by the evaluatiation metric that is supplied or selected by default for the objective) on the evaluation data passed under evals. Must pass evals in order to use this functionality. Setting this parameter adds the xgb.cb.early.stop() callback. If NULL, early stopping will not be used.
maximize	If feval and early_stopping_rounds are set, then this parameter must be set as well. When it is TRUE, it means the larger the evaluation score the better. This parameter is passed to the xgb.cb.early.stop() callback.
save_period	When not NULL, model is saved to disk after every save_period rounds. 0 means save at the end. The saving is handled by the xgb.cb.save.model() callback.
save_name	the name or path for periodically saved model file.
xgb_model	A previously built model to continue the training from. Could be either an object of class xgb.Booster, or its raw data, or the name of a file with a previously saved model.
callbacks	A list of callback functions to perform various task during boosting. See xgb.Callback(). Some of the callbacks are automatically created depending on the parameters' values. User can provide either existing or their own callback methods in order to customize the training process. Note that some callbacks might try to leave attributes in the resulting model object, such as an evaluation log (a data.table object) - be aware that these objects are kept as R attributes, and thus do not get saved when using XGBoost's own serializaters like xgb.save() (but are kept when using R serializers like saveRDS()).
...	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.

Details

Compared to xgboost(), the xgb.train() interface supports advanced features such as evals, customized objective and evaluation metric functions, among others, with the difference these work xgb.DMatrix objects and do not follow typical R idioms.

Parallelization is automatically enabled if OpenMP is present. Number of threads can also be manually specified via the nthread parameter.

While in XGBoost language bindings, the default random seed defaults to zero, in R, if a parameter seed is not manually supplied, it will generate a random seed through R's own random number generator, whose seed in turn is controllable through set.seed. If seed is passed, it will override the RNG from R.

The following callbacks are automatically created when certain parameters are set:

• xgb.cb.print.evaluation() is turned on when verbose > 0 and the print_every_n parameter is passed to it.

• xgb.cb.evaluation.log() is on when evals is present.

• xgb.cb.early.stop(): When early_stopping_rounds is set.

• xgb.cb.save.model(): When save_period > 0 is set.

Note that objects of type xgb.Booster as returned by this function behave a bit differently from typical R objects (it's an 'altrep' list class), and it makes a separation between internal booster attributes (restricted to jsonifyable data), accessed through xgb.attr() and shared between interfaces through serialization functions like xgb.save(); and R-specific attributes (typically the result from a callback), accessed through attributes() and attr(), which are otherwise only used in the R interface, only kept when using R's serializers like saveRDS(), and not anyhow used by functions like predict.xgb.Booster().

Be aware that one such R attribute that is automatically added is params - this attribute is assigned from the params argument to this function, and is only meant to serve as a reference for what went into the booster, but is not used in other methods that take a booster object - so for example, changing the booster's configuration requires calling ⁠xgb.config<-⁠ or ⁠xgb.model.parameters<-⁠, while simply modifying ⁠attributes(model)$params$<...>⁠ will have no effect elsewhere.

Value

An object of class xgb.Booster.

References

Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin, "XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System", 22nd SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2016, https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.02754

See Also

xgb.Callback(), predict.xgb.Booster(), xgb.cv()

Examples

data(agaricus.train, package = "xgboost")
data(agaricus.test, 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)
)
dtest <- with(
  agaricus.test, xgb.DMatrix(data, label = label, nthread = nthread)
)
evals <- list(train = dtrain, eval = dtest)

## A simple xgb.train example:
param <- xgb.params(
  max_depth = 2,
  nthread = nthread,
  objective = "binary:logistic",
  eval_metric = "auc"
)
bst <- xgb.train(param, dtrain, nrounds = 2, evals = evals, verbose = 0)

## An xgb.train example where custom objective and evaluation metric are
## used:
logregobj <- function(preds, dtrain) {
   labels <- getinfo(dtrain, "label")
   preds <- 1/(1 + exp(-preds))
   grad <- preds - labels
   hess <- preds * (1 - preds)
   return(list(grad = grad, hess = hess))
}
evalerror <- function(preds, dtrain) {
  labels <- getinfo(dtrain, "label")
  err <- as.numeric(sum(labels != (preds > 0)))/length(labels)
  return(list(metric = "error", value = err))
}

# These functions could be used by passing them as 'objective' and
# 'eval_metric' parameters in the params list:
param <- xgb.params(
  max_depth = 2,
  nthread = nthread,
  objective = logregobj,
  eval_metric = evalerror
)
bst <- xgb.train(param, dtrain, nrounds = 2, evals = evals, verbose = 0)

# ... or as dedicated 'objective' and 'custom_metric' parameters of xgb.train:
bst <- xgb.train(
  within(param, rm("objective", "eval_metric")),
  dtrain, nrounds = 2, evals = evals,
  objective = logregobj, custom_metric = evalerror
)


## An xgb.train example of using variable learning rates at each iteration:
param <- xgb.params(
  max_depth = 2,
  learning_rate = 1,
  nthread = nthread,
  objective = "binary:logistic",
  eval_metric = "auc"
)
my_learning_rates <- list(learning_rate = c(0.5, 0.1))

bst <- xgb.train(
 param,
 dtrain,
 nrounds = 2,
 evals = evals,
 verbose = 0,
 callbacks = list(xgb.cb.reset.parameters(my_learning_rates))
)

## Early stopping:
bst <- xgb.train(
  param, dtrain, nrounds = 25, evals = evals, early_stopping_rounds = 3
)

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