What is XGBoost and what specific technical improvements does it make over standard gradient boosting?

Question

Data Science with Python — Hard

What is XGBoost and what specific technical improvements does it make over standard gradient boosting?

Accepted Answer

XGBoost improves standard gradient boosting by incorporating second-order Taylor expansion, regularization terms, column subsampling, cache-aware computation, and handling of sparse data. These enhancements make XGBoost faster and more regularized compared to vanilla gradient boosting.