XGBoost Linear Model Learner

Learns a linear model based XGBoost model for classification. XGBoost is a popular machine learning library that is based on the ideas of boosting. Checkout the official documentation for some tutorials on how XGBoost works. Since XGBoost requires its features to be single precision floats, we automatically cast double precision values to float, which can cause problems for extreme numbers.

Options

Objective: For binary classification tasks there exists the option to use the binary logistic or the softprob objective function, while for more than two classes only softprob is available.
Target column: The column containing the class variable. Note that the column domain must contain the possible values. Please use the Domain Calculator node to calculate the possible values if they are not assigned yet.
Weight column: The column containing the row weights (also called sample weights or instance weights). Note that the selected column must not contain missing values.
Feature columns: Allows to select which columns should be used as features in training. Note that the domain of nominal features must contain the possible values otherwise the node can't be executed. Use the Domain Calculator node to calculate any missing possible value sets.
Boosting rounds: The number of models to train in the boosting ensemble.
Base score: The initial prediction score of all instances; this global bias will have little effect for a sufficiently large number of iterations.
Use static random seed: If checked, the seed displayed in the text field is used as seed for randomized operations such as sampling. Otherwise a new seed is generated for each node execution. Note that the Shotgun updater is always non-deterministic even if a static seed is set.
Manual number of threads: Allows to specify the number of threads to use for training. The default if the checkbox is not selected is the number of available cores.

Booster

Lambda

L2 regularization term on weights. Increasing this value will make model more conservative. Normalized to number of training examples.

Alpha

L1 regularization term on weights. Increasing this value will make model more conservative. Normalized to number of training examples.

Updater

Choice of algorithm to fit linear model

Shotgun: Parallel coordinate descent algorithm based on shotgun algorithm. Uses ‘hogwild’ parallelism and therefore produces a nondeterministic solution on each run no matter whether a static random seed is set.
CoordDescent: Ordinary coordinate descent algorithm. Also multithreaded but still produces a deterministic solution.

Feature selector

Feature selection and ordering method.

Cyclic: Deterministc selection by cycling through features one at a time.
Shuffle: Similar to cyclic but with random feature shuffling prior to update.
Random: Randomly (with replacement) selects coordinates.
Greedy: It is fully deterministic. It allows restricting the selection to top k features per group with the largest magnitude of univariate weight change, by setting the top k parameter. Doing so would reduce the complexity to O(num_feature*top k).
Thrifty: Thrifty, approximately-greedy feature selector. Prior to cyclic updates, reorders features in descending magnitude of their univariate weight changes. This operation is multithreaded and is a linear complexity approximation of the quadratic greedy selection. It allows restricting the selection to top_k features per group with the largest magnitude of univariate weight change, by setting the top k parameter.

Top k

The number of top feature to select in greedy and thrifty feature selector. The value of 0 corresponds to using all features.

Input Ports

: The data to learn from.

Output Ports

: The trained model.
: The coefficients of the trained model. For softprob there is one group of coefficients per class while for binary logistic there are only coefficients for the first class.

Popular Predecessors

Popular Successors

Views

This node has no views

Workflows

Developers

You want to see the source code for this node? Click the following button and we’ll use our super-powers to find it for you.

Installation

To use this node in KNIME, install the extension KNIME XGBoost Integration from the below update site following our NodePit Product and Node Installation Guide:

v5.9

A zipped version of the software site can be downloaded here.

Plugin provider: KNIME AG, Zurich, Switzerland

Plugin version: 5.9.0.v202511130858

On NodePit since: 2025-12-11

Last update: 2026-01-05

KNIME versions: Since v4.6

Deploy, schedule, execute, and monitor your KNIME workflows locally, in the cloud or on-premises – with our brand new NodePit Runner.

Try NodePit Runner!