Does XGBoost Need Feature Scaling Or Normalization?

If you are using XGBoost with decision trees as your base model, you don’t need to worry about scaling or normalizing your features. Decision trees are not sensitive to the scale of the features. In practice, I have seen very minor differences in score by scaling features for decision trees, but these are due to numerical computing implementations and not significant in practice. If you are using XGBoost with linear models as base models, it is a good idea to scale or normalize the features....

December 30, 2022 · 7 min · Mario Filho