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I would like to use cross validation with catboost. Since I do not just want to use catboost but also sampling I am using a pipeline and hence cannot use catboost's own cross validation (which works if I just use catboost and not a pipeline). So I want to use sklearn's cross validation, which works fine if I use just numerical variables but as soon as I also include the categorical variables (cat_features) and use catboost's encoding, cross_validate doesn't work anymore. Even if I don't use a pipeline but just catboost alone I get a KeyError: 0 message with cross_validate. But I don't understand why. This is part of my code that doesn't work:

from sklearn.model_selection import cross_validate
model = cb.CatBoostClassifier(**params, cat_features=cat_features)
cv_score = cross_validate(model, X_train, y_train, scoring='roc_auc', cv=5, return_train_score=True)
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  • $\begingroup$ Could you identify where in the error traceback the KeyError is happening? Are your cat_features strings/column names, or integers/column indices? $\endgroup$
    – Ben Reiniger ♦
    Aug 26, 2019 at 2:58
  • $\begingroup$ My cat_features are object and category types. The KeyError happens already in the beginning, the error message starts like this: KeyError Traceback (most recent call last) ~\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\indexes\base.py in get_loc(self, key, method, tolerance) 2656 try: -> 2657 return self._engine.get_loc(key) 2658 except KeyError: pandas/_libs/index.pyx in pandas._libs.index.IndexEngine.get_loc() .... KeyError: 0 During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: $\endgroup$
    – corianne1234
    Aug 26, 2019 at 9:39
  • $\begingroup$ I think it is because sklearn's cross_validate cannot really encode the categorical features while fitting the data. It's probably a problem of sklearn's cross_validate as everything works perfectly fine when doing the same thing but using model.fit. $\endgroup$
    – corianne1234
    Aug 27, 2019 at 11:55
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    $\begingroup$ I can't recreate the error. See github.com/bmreiniger/datascience.stackexchange/blob/master/… . Can you share your code, data, and/or full traceback? $\endgroup$
    – Ben Reiniger ♦
    Aug 27, 2019 at 14:26
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    $\begingroup$ I found out when i do xtrain.astype('O') it works. $\endgroup$
    – corianne1234
    Aug 28, 2019 at 13:11

1 Answer 1

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I found out that adding xtrain.astype('O') works.

Apparently catboost doesn't work with pandas Categorical dtypes yet: https://github.com/catboost/catboost/issues/814

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