Pedro Tabacof
Pedro Tabacof is based in Dublin and is currently a staff data scientist at Wildlife Studios (a mobile gaming company). Previously, he has worked at Nubank (fintech) and iFood (food delivery app). He has used and deployed machine learning models for anti-fraud, credit risk, lifetime value and marketing attribution, using XGBoost or LightGBM in almost all cases. Academically, he has a master's degree in deep learning and 300+ citations.
Sessions
Gradient-boosted trees (XGBoost, LightGBM, Catboost) have become the staple of machine learning for tabular datasets. While most data scientists have made use of them at some point, many don’t know the true power those Python libraries provide. I will take LightGBM as an example and show in practice how it handles missing value imputation and categorical encoding natively, the different loss functions it provides for different problems (including the creation of your own loss function!), and how to interpret the resulting models. My aim is to show how LightGBM is like a Swiss army knife for machine learning and why it is the most pragmatic choice for tabular problems.