Development Guide

Algorithms

Refer to Features for understanding of important algorithms used in LightGBM.

Classes and Code Structure

Important Classes

Class	Description
Application	The entrance of application, including training and prediction logic
Bin	Data structure used for storing feature discrete values (converted from float values)
Boosting	Boosting interface (GBDT, DART, GOSS, etc.)
Config	Stores parameters and configurations
Dataset	Stores information of dataset
DatasetLoader	Used to construct dataset
FeatureGroup	Stores the data of feature, could be multiple features
Metric	Evaluation metrics
Network	Network interfaces and communication algorithms
ObjectiveFunction	Objective functions used to train
Tree	Stores information of tree model
TreeLearner	Used to learn trees

Code Structure

Path	Description
./include	Header files
./include/utils	Some common functions
./src/application	Implementations of training and prediction logic
./src/boosting	Implementations of Boosting
./src/io	Implementations of IO related classes, including Bin, Config, Dataset, DatasetLoader, Feature and Tree
./src/metric	Implementations of metrics
./src/network	Implementations of network functions
./src/objective	Implementations of objective functions
./src/treelearner	Implementations of tree learners

Documents API

Refer to docs README.

C API

Refer to C API or the comments in c_api.h file, from which the documentation is generated.

High Level Language Package

See the implementations at Python-package and R-package.

Questions

Refer to FAQ.

Also feel free to open issues if you met problems.