XGBoost or in long version Extreme Gradient Boosting got recently very popular, especially on Kaggle competitions. It proved to outperform many other algorithms on tasks such as classification and regression. I used it few times as well and that’s why I decided to take a closer look into XGBoost to see how it works.
When I think about Machine Learning there comes R and Python into my mind. There’s a nice set of ML libraries and packages that can be used to perform analysis or visualize data in both of those languages. But when it comes to Java ML libraries there aren’t that many. Of course there are nice Java frameworks, but they are mostly designed in such a way that you don’t actually do the coding. So how can a Java programmer easily incorporate ML into their application? I used 2 libraries which allowed me to do exactly that.