html input format,Text Input Format of DMatrix

Basic Input Format¶

XGBoost currently supports two text formats for ingesting data: LIBSVM and CSV. The rest of this document will describe the LIBSVM format. (See this Wikipedia article for a description of the CSV format.). Please be careful that, XGBoost does not understand file extensions, nor try to guess the file format, as there is no universal agreement upon file extension of LIBSVM or CSV. Instead it employs URI format for specifying the precise input file type. For example if you provide a csv file ./data.train.csv as input, XGBoost will blindly use the default LIBSVM parser to digest it and generate a parser error. Instead, users need to provide an URI in the form of train.csv?format=csv. For external memory input, the URI should of a form similar to train.csv?format=csv#dtrain.cache. See Data Interface and Using XGBoost External Memory Version also.

For training or predicting, XGBoost takes an instance file with the format as below:

train.txt¶

1 101:1.2 102:0.03

0 1:2.1 10001:300 10002:400

0 0:1.3 1:0.3

1 0:0.01 1:0.3

0 0:0.2 1:0.3

Each line represent a single instance, and in the first line ‘1’ is the instance label, ‘101’ and ‘102’ are feature indices, ‘1.2’ and ‘0.03’ are feature values. In the binary classification case, ‘1’ is used to indicate positive samples, and ‘0’ is used to indicate negative samples. We also support probability values in [0,1] as label, to indicate the probability of the instance being positive.