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According to the documentation of Scikit-Learn Gradient Boosting Regressor:

init: estimator or ‘zero’, default=None: An estimator object that is used to compute the initial predictions. init has to provide fit and predict. If ‘zero’, the initial raw predictions are set to zero. By default a DummyEstimator is used, predicting either the average target value (for loss=’ls’), or a quantile for the other losses.

So what quantile is used for the DummyRegressor if the loss function is 'huber'? Is it the 50-quantile, ie. median?

I need this information because I am reconstructing the predictor for the Gradient Boosting Regressor for use in another software environment.

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Yes, a GBM with Huber loss initializes with the median. The relevant bit of code is the method init_estimator of the loss class, in the file _gb_losses.py. For HuberLossFunction:

def init_estimator(self):
    return DummyRegressor(strategy='quantile', quantile=.5)

(source)

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. I am somewhat confused. Is it the median of the x's to be tested? Shouldn't it be the median of the y's of the original samples? $\endgroup$
    – Chong Lip Phang
    Dec 26, 2020 at 22:19
  • $\begingroup$ It is indeed the median of the training y. See e.g. the documentation for DummyRegressor. $\endgroup$
    – Ben Reiniger ♦
    Dec 27, 2020 at 0:03

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