Learns Gradient Boosted Trees with the objective of regression. The algorithm uses very shallow regression trees and a special form of boosting to build an ensemble of trees. The implementation follows the algorithm in section 4.4 of the paper "Greedy Function Approximation: A Gradient Boosting Machine" by Jerome H. Friedman (1999). For more information you can also take a look at this .

In a regression tree the predicted value for a leaf node is the mean target value of the records within the leaf. Hence the predictions are best (with respect to the training data) if the variance of target values within a leaf is minimal. This is achieved by splits that minimize the sum of squared errors in their respective children.

Sampling

This node allows to perform row sampling (bagging) and attribute sampling (attribute bagging) similar to the random forest* and tree ensemble nodes. If sampling is used this is usually referred to as Stochastic Gradient Boosted Trees . The respective settings can be found in the Advanced Options tab.

(*) RANDOM FORESTS is a registered trademark of Minitab, LLC and is used with Minitab’s permission.