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Gradient boosting is a machine learning technique based on boosting in a functional space, where the target is pseudo-residuals instead of residuals as in traditional boosting. It gives a prediction model in the form of an ensemble of weak prediction models, i.e., models that make very few assumptions about the data, which are typically simple decision trees.[1][2] When a decision tree is the weak learner, the resulting algorithm is called gradient-boosted trees; it usually outperforms random forest.[1] As with other boosting methods, a gradient-boosted trees model is built in stages, but it generalizes the other methods by allowing optimization of an arbitrary differentiable loss function.