kernel_tuner VS catboost

I've created Kernel Tuner (https://github.com/KernelTuner/kernel_tuner) as a small software development tool, because I was writing a lot of CUDA and OpenCL kernels at the time. I didn't want to manually figure out what best thread block dimensions and work division among threads were on every GPU over and over again.

The tool evolved quite a bit since the first versions. I'm also using it for testing GPU code, teaching, and it has become one of the main drivers behind a lot of the research that I do.

We have an open science policy, so anyone can use our framework yourself to optimize stuff, if you want! The original paper is linked at the bottom of the GitHub page.

This is a great post for people who are new to optimizing GPU code.

It is interesting to see that the author got this far without interchanging the innermost loop over k to the outermost loop, as is done in CUTLASS (https://github.com/NVIDIA/cutlass).

As you can see in this blog post the code ends up with a lot of compile-time constants (e.g. BLOCKSIZE, BM, BN, BK, TM, TN) one way to optimize this code further is to use an auto-tuner to find the optimal value for all of these parameters for your GPU and problem size, for example Kernel Tuner (https://github.com/KernelTuner/kernel_tuner)

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.