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9.12: Exercises

  • Page ID
    141903
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    1. Explain the main difference between Gradient Boosting and Random Forests in terms of how trees are built.
    2. Describe why learning rate (shrinkage) is important in Gradient Boosting and what happens if it is set too high or too low.
    3. Define overfitting in the context of Gradient Boosting and provide two methods to reduce it.
    4. Explain why Gradient Boosting is considered a sequential ensemble method compared to bagging techniques.
    5. Discuss the role of loss functions in Gradient Boosting and provide two examples of loss functions used for classification and regression.
    6. Describe the impact of tree depth (max_depth) on model complexity and performance in Gradient Boosting.
    7. Compare the role of the number of estimators (trees) with the learning rate in Gradient Boosting. Why is there usually a trade-off?
    8. Explain what early stopping is and why it is used in Gradient Boosting.
    9. Describe how Gradient Boosting handles bias and variance differently than a single decision tree.
    10. Explain the purpose of feature importance in Gradient Boosting and how it can help in business decision-making.
    11. A gradient boosting model produces an AUC score of 0.82. Interpret what this means about the model’s ability to distinguish between classes.
    12. The confusion matrix from a gradient boosting model shows high recall but low precision. Interpret what this means in terms of model performance and potential business implications.
    13. Feature importance output indicates that customer tenure is twice as important as monthly spending. Interpret what this means for understanding drivers of the target variable.
    14. A gradient boosting model reports an accuracy of 90% but an AUC of 0.65. Interpret why accuracy might be misleading and what AUC reveals about model performance.
    15. Partial dependence plots show that the probability of churn increases sharply when monthly spend drops below $40. Interpret how this information could be used in customer retention strategies.

    This page titled 9.12: Exercises is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Elbert L. Hearon, M.B.A., M.S..

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