catboost VS MLflow

CatBoost is another popular and high-performance open-source implementation of the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT). To learn how to use this algorithm, please see example notebooks for Classification and Regression.

Here are our benchmarks on training time comparing Tangram's Gradient Boosted Decision Tree Library to LightGBM, XGBoost, CatBoost, and sklearn.

Catboost - CatBoost is an open-source software library developed by Yandex. It provides a gradient boosting framework which attempts to solve for Categorical features using a permutation driven alternative compared to the classical algorithm. Link - https://catboost.ai/

CatBoost is an open source algorithm based on gradient boosted decision trees. It supports numerical, categorical and text features. Check out the docs.

If you considering GBDT check out catboost, unfortunately RF mode is not available but library implement lots of interesting categorical encoding tricks that boost accuracy.

The data contains a large number of categorical features. The most suitable for obtaining a base-line model, in my opinion, is CatBoost. It is a high-performance, open-source library for gradient boosting on decision trees.

How can this be? The current state of practice in AI/ML work requires adaptivity, which is uncommon in classical computational fields. There are myriad tools that capture the work across the many instances of the AI/ML lifecycle. The idea that any one tool could sufficiently capture the dynamic work is unrealistic. Take, for example, an experiment tracking tool like W&B or MLFlow; some form of experiment tracking is necessary in typical model training lifecycles. Such a tool requires some notion of a dataset. However, a tool focusing on experiment tracking is orthogonal to the needs of analyzing model performance at the data sample level, which is critical to understanding the failure modes of models. The way one does this depends on the type of data and the AI/ML task at hand. In other words, MLOps is inherently an intricate mosaic, as the capabilities and best practices of AI/ML work evolve.

MLflow is an open-source platform for managing the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle. It includes features for experiment tracking, model versioning, and deployment, enabling developers to track and compare experiments, package models into reproducible runs, and manage model deployment across multiple environments.

Platforms such as MLflow monitor the development stages of machine learning models. In parallel, Data Version Control (DVC) brings version control system-like functions to the realm of data sets and models.

MLFlow - http://mlflow.org

MLflow:

In search for a tool that needs comparable configuration I looked into mlflow and found this. https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow/blob/master/mlflow/environment_variables.py There they define a class _EnvironmentVariable and create many objects out of it, for any variable they need. The get method of this class is in principle a decorated os.getenv. Maybe that is something I can take as orientation.

I have been using DVC and MLflow since then DVC had only data tracking and MLflow only model tracking. I can say both are awesome now and maybe the only factor I would like to mention is that IMO, MLflow is a bit harder to learn while DVC is just a git practically.