What does XGBoost stand for?

eXtreme Gradient Boosting

XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) is a powerful and efficient machine learning algorithm based on gradient boosting, designed for structured/tabular data. It builds models in a sequential manner, where each new tree corrects the errors made by the previous ones. XGBoost is known for its speed, scalability, and high predictive accuracy, making it a top choice in many data science competitions and real-world applications like credit scoring, fraud detection, and customer behavior analysis.

One of its key strengths lies in features like regularization (to prevent overfitting), parallel processing, and handling of missing values, which make it more advanced than traditional gradient boosting methods. XGBoost supports classification, regression, and ranking problems, and is widely used in both academic research and industry-level projects.