Xgboost-How to use “mae” as objective function?

Question

I know xgboost need first gradient and second gradient, but anybody else has used "mae" as obj function?

Answer 1

The XGBoost library in python implements Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by using the following Huber loss function.

For example:

import xgboost as xgb

dtrain = xgb.DMatrix(x_train, label=y_train)

dtest = xgb.DMatrix(x_test, label=y_test)

param = {'max_depth': 5}

num_round = 10

def huber_approx_obj(preds, dtrain):

    d = preds - dtrain.get_labels() #remove .get_labels() for sklearn

    h = 1  #h is delta in the graphic

    scale = 1 + (d / h) ** 2

    scale_sqrt = np.sqrt(scale)

    grad = d / scale_sqrt

    hess = 1 / scale / scale_sqrt

    return grad, hess

bst = xgb.train(param, dtrain, num_round, obj=huber_approx_obj)  

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Hope this answer helps.