does xgb multi-class require one-hot encoding?

Question

I was trying an xgboost from python with a multiclass single-label problem and assumed the label can be an integer indicating my class (as opposed to eg one-hot) .

params = {'eta': 0.1,
#          'objective': 'binary:logistic', 
          'objective': 'multi:softmax', 
          'scale_pos_weight':9,
           'eval_metric': 'auc', 
           'nthread':25,
         'num_class':6}

dtrain = xgb.DMatrix(df_train_x,label= df_train_y)
dvalid = xgb.DMatrix(df_val_x,label= df_val_y)
watchlist = [(dtrain, 'train'), (dvalid, 'valid')]
model = xgb.train(params, dtrain, 500,watchlist, maximize=True, verbose_eval=50,early_stopping_rounds=20)

However I hit an error

(1353150 vs. 225525) label size predict size not match

and I note that my sample size is 225525 , number of classes is 6 , and 6*225525 is 1353150 so it appears that xgb is looking for one-hot ... however when i use one hot I get an error hinting that one-hot can't be used -

dtrain = xgb.DMatrix(df_train_x,label= df_train_y)
ValueError: DataFrame for label cannot have multiple columns

!!!

Answer 1

As Majid stated in the comment, using AUC is causing this error as normally ROC curves are calculated for binary classification. Try removing the eval_metric line and your code will run properly. That or removing the watchlist and early stopping options.

The eval metrics you need to use for multiclass are either merror or mlogloss which are the only ones specific for multiclass in the xgboost documentation.