NEWS

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fastgbm 0.7.0

Competing risks (comrisk)

• fastgbm() gains comrisk = c("sh", "csh", "ccsh"), the three competing risks options of 'CoxBoost' (Binder et al. 2009), with trees in place of componentwise linear updates:
  • "sh": Fine-Gray subdistribution hazard for one cause (cause, default the first), a new compiled "finegray" objective with inverse probability of censoring weighted risk sets (Kaplan-Meier of the censoring distribution, as in 'CoxBoost').
  • "csh": one independent cause-specific Cox booster per cause.
  • "ccsh": coupled cause-specific boosters. Each round grows one shared tree whose splits are ranked by Fisher's combination of the per-cause score p-values, with leaf values fitted separately per cause.
• Competing risks are triggered by comrisk, by a multi-state survival::Surv(time, factor(status)) response (formula interface included), or by a status with 0 and at least two event codes. Validation data and early stopping work for all three options.
• New predict.fastgbm_comrisk(): type = "cif" returns one cumulative incidence matrix per cause, computed as in CoxBoost::predict(type = "CIF"); "link" and "response" return one column per cause. importance() aggregates over the per-cause sub-models.

Bug fixes

• Histogram bin cuts are now placed midway between consecutive unique values, so each group of unique values gets its own bin (a 0/1 feature is cut at 0.5). Previously a cut could equal an observed value and merge adjacent groups. Fitted models can differ slightly from earlier 0.7.0 builds.

fastgbm 0.6.1 (2026-09-01)

CRAN resubmission fixes

• Single-quoted 'RcppParallel' in the DESCRIPTION Description field (per CRAN reviewer feedback: software names must be single-quoted in Title/Description).
• Added a methods reference to Description: Friedman (2001) doi:10.1214/aos/1013203451, the canonical gradient boosting machine reference (per CRAN reviewer request).

fastgbm 0.6.0

New task type: multiclass classification (objective = "multiclass")

• fastgbm() now covers a fourth task type: multiclass classification, implemented as one binary (one-vs-rest) fastgbm sub-model per class, all sharing the same hyperparameters and reusing the already-tested, already-correct compiled logistic objective rather than adding a new compiled kernel. predict(type = "prob") renormalizes the K independent binary probabilities to sum to 1 per row; predict(type = "class") is their argmax.
• objective is inferred automatically: a factor/character response with 3+ levels defaults to "multiclass" (2-level factors still default to "binary", unchanged).
• metrics() reports accuracy and multiclass log loss; importance() combines split gain across the K sub-models.
• Works through both the matrix and formula (y ~ .) interfaces, and supports validation/early_stopping (applied per sub-model).
• A native K-tree softmax boosting objective (a single compiled kernel producing all K class scores per round) remains a possible future upgrade over the one-vs-rest approach, but was not implemented here to avoid introducing untested changes to the compiled training loop.

fastgbm 0.5.0

Scaling benchmark extended to p = 1000

• inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark-scaling.R's P_GRID now includes 1000 (was {10, 50, 100}). Confirms and sharpens the earlier colsample finding: at n = 1000, the fastgbm/ranger training-time ratio reaches 12.04x (slower) at p = 1000, vs. 4.45x at p = 100. Unlike lower p, growing n does not rescue fastgbm at p = 1000 within the tested range -- it is still ~2.8x slower than ranger even at n = 20000 (colsample tuning matters most exactly in this regime). The thread-count sweep, now run at the new largest grid point (n = 20000, p = 1000), shows better multi-threaded speedup than at p = 100 (5.8x vs. 3.0x at 16 threads) since a wider colsample-sampled feature set gives the level-wise split search more to parallelize per level.

Multi-threaded scaling: level-wise (breadth-first) tree growth

• Added inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark-multithreaded.R: a direct head-to-head of fastgbm/ranger/xgboost at matched thread counts ({1, 4, 12}, gbm shown only as a fixed single-threaded reference), at the largest n/p grid point from the scaling benchmark. Finding: the single-threaded win over ranger reported below did not survive multi-threading -- ranger (independent trees split across threads) and xgboost (histogram build parallelized across rows and features) both scaled substantially better than fastgbm's prior per-node split-search parallelism, to the point fastgbm became the slowest of the three at high thread counts despite winning at threads = 1.
• Root cause: the previous per-node parallelFor() dispatch (one call per node, parallelizing across that node's own sampled features) ran out of useful work several levels into a tree -- a single node's row/feature count shrinks fast with depth, but the fixed cost of a parallelFor() call does not, so deep, numerous, small nodes got little benefit from more threads.
• Fix: build_tree() now grows trees breadth-first, one level at a time. Every node active at the current depth has its split-search tasks pooled into a single combined batch (LevelSplitFinder, replacing the previous per-node SplitFinder) before any of them run, so the parallelized unit of work is an entire tree level, not one node -- keeping per-dispatch work large even deep in the tree, since each level roughly doubles its node count while roughly halving each node's row count (the total per-level work stays close to constant).
• This changes tree structure from the prior depth-first version (a different, but equally valid, order of drawing each node's colsample subset), verified rather than assumed safe: the existing leaf-value correctness test and a new multi-threaded-vs-single-threaded identical-tree check both pass (tests/testthat/test-tree-building.R), plus the full pre-existing suite (244 tests, unchanged pass count).
• Net effect at n = 20000, p = 100: fastgbm's own multi-threaded speedup improved from ~1.9x/~3.3x (4/12 threads) to ~2.8x/~5.2x. This narrows, but does not close, the gap to ranger's ~4.6x/~9.7x and xgboost's ~3.2x/~6.0x -- see README's "Multi-threaded head-to-head" and "Level-wise tree growth" sections.
• A smaller first attempt -- increasing parallelFor()'s grainSize from 1 to roughly one chunk per thread, on the theory that fewer/larger scheduled tasks would cut scheduling overhead -- was tried, measured, and found to make things worse (e.g. threads=4 at n=20000, p=100: ~1.36s -> ~1.56s), then reverted. RcppParallel's own work-stealing scheduler at grainSize = 1 already balanced the per-node case better than a fixed static chunking did.

Split-search performance: child G/H inherited from the parent's split, not recomputed

• Every node in build_tree()'s grow() recomputed its total gradient/Hessian sum (G/H) with a fresh full pass over its own rows, even though those exact values were already produced as a byproduct of the parent's winning split (GL/HL/GR/HR, captured in NodeSplit's new fields during the SplitFinder histogram scan). G/H are now passed down to each child instead, removing a second full O(rows) pass per node on top of the split search itself; only the root node (no parent split to inherit from) still computes them directly, once.
• Unlike the two changes below, this one is not bit-identical to before: it sums the same values in a different order (histogram-bin order inherited from the parent vs. row order for a from-scratch sum), a legitimate floating-point reassociation that can occasionally tip a near-tied split threshold and produce a different-but-equally-valid tree. Verified directly rather than assumed correct: a new test (tests/testthat/test-tree-building.R) independently recomputes each leaf's -G/(H+lambda) in R from the actual rows reaching it (subsample/ colsample fixed at 1 so that set is unambiguous) and checks it against the compiled value to 1e-10, plus a multi-threaded-vs-single-threaded identical-tree check; both pass, along with the full pre-existing suite (225 tests, unchanged).
• Net effect on the Friedman1 benchmark (same setup as below): fastgbm training time dropped further, from ~147ms to ~143-146ms, turning the prior statistical tie with ranger into a narrow but real win (median training time 0.099s vs. ranger's 0.104s over 10 repeated splits, win/loss/tie 6/3/1; see inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark-regression.R).

Scaling benchmark: n x p x threads, plus tuning tips

• Added inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark-scaling.R: sweeps n in {1000, 5000, 20000} and p in {10, 50, 100} (Friedman1 plus pure-noise columns) comparing fastgbm vs. ranger training time, single-threaded, plus a thread-count sweep (1/2/4/all-cores) at the largest grid point.
• Finding: fastgbm's relative speed vs. ranger improves as n grows (1.30x slower at n=1000, p=10 to 0.57x, i.e. faster, at n=20000, p=10) but degrades as p grows (1.30x -> 4.41x slower at n=1000 as p goes 10 -> 100). Root cause identified, not just observed: fastgbm's default colsample = 0.8 searches far more features per split than ranger's default mtry (p/3 for regression) once p is large; matching it (colsample = 1/3) turns a loss into a win at n=5000, p=100 (0.98s -> 0.50s, vs. ranger's 0.57s). Multi-threading gives real but sub-linear speedup (1.8x at 4 threads, 2.3x at 16, on a 16-core machine), as expected for within-tree (not across-tree) parallelism.
• See README's "Scaling behavior vs. n, p, and threads" section for the full analysis and resulting tuning-tip list.

Split-search performance: two fixed costs removed from src/fastgbm.cpp

• The per-(node, feature) histogram accumulation in SplitFinder made two full passes over the node's rows - one only to find the highest occupied bin, a second to accumulate gradient/hessian sums into an array sized to that bin. Since each feature's bin range is already known globally from the initial binning pass (max_bin_by_feature, computed once in fastgbm_fit_cpp), the histogram buffer is now sized up front and a single pass both accumulates the sums and finds the tightest split-loop bound (the highest bin actually present among these specific rows).
• Removed the per-call heap allocation of the two histogram buffers by reusing thread_local buffers across every (node, feature) call on a given thread instead - safe because parallelFor() gives each worker thread disjoint index ranges, never concurrent access to the same thread's buffer.
• RcppParallel::parallelFor() was dispatched for large-enough nodes even when threads = 1L was explicitly requested, paying real thread-pool scheduling overhead for work that only ever ran on one thread. A single explicit thread request now always takes the direct serial call, regardless of node/feature size.
• Net effect on the Friedman1 regression benchmark (n = 2000, p = 10, 200 trees, single-threaded, bench::mark() median): fastgbm training time dropped from ~159ms to ~147ms, closing what was previously a clear gap to ranger (~143-145ms) to a statistical tie (win/loss/tie 5/5 across 10 repeated splits in inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark-regression.R, and fastgbm's own median training time is marginally faster than ranger's: 0.1005s vs. 0.1015s). See README's "Split-search optimizations" section and inst/benchmarks/regression-exectime-bench.png/.csv.
• All changes are behavior-preserving - identical split decisions, verified by the full existing test suite including the thread-count-determinism and finite-difference gradient/Hessian checks (test-parallel.R, test-gradients.R).

fastgbm 0.4.0

Regression and binary classification objectives added back (objective = "regression" / "binary")

• fastgbm() now covers three task types, not just survival: objective = "regression" (squared error) and objective = "binary" (logistic classification, 0/1 response or two-level factor) join the existing "cox"/"aft"/"pexp" survival objectives. All three task types share the same tree-growing engine, histogram binning, missing-value routing, and validation-based early-stopping machinery -- the compiled backend (src/fastgbm.cpp) only needed two new gradient/Hessian pairs (compute_gaussian_grad_hess, compute_logistic_grad_hess) and matching loss functions for early stopping, verified against finite differences in tests/testthat/test-gradients.R.
• objective is now optional: it defaults to "cox" when time/status or a survival::Surv response is supplied, otherwise it is inferred from y (a 0/1 vector or two-level factor defaults to "binary", anything else numeric to "regression").
• The formula interface (y ~ .) now supports non-Surv responses for regression/binary, not just Surv(time, status) ~ ..
• predict(), metrics() (RMSE for regression, log loss for binary), importance(), and pdp() all work unchanged across the new objectives.
• Survival behavior is unchanged by this work -- the change is additive (new objectives reuse the time C++ argument slot for the plain response, exactly like pexp already reuses it for exposure), and the full pre-existing survival test suite still passes.

Per-node feature resampling, default hyperparameters, and a 3-objective benchmark

• Changed feature subsampling (colsample) from once-per-tree (xgboost's colsample_bytree semantics) to once-per-node (ranger's mtry semantics, resampled at every split): src/fastgbm.cpp's build_tree() now takes p/colsample/rng instead of a precomputed feature_ids list, and resamples inside grow() at each node. Verified to preserve thread-count determinism (all parallel-determinism tests still pass). Improves both training speed (smaller effective per-node search) and C-index versus per-tree sampling on the benchmark datasets.
• Bug fix (found while making this change, applies to all objectives): the compiled backend read feature names from a nonexistent "colnames" attribute on the input matrix (base R matrices store column names under dimnames(x)[[2]], not a top-level "colnames" attribute), so importance() always showed generic V1, V2, ... labels regardless of the matrix's actual colnames().
• Changed fastgbm()'s default hyperparameters to match what all this session's diagnostics actually validated -- they had drifted out of sync with the benchmark's own settings: learning_rate 0.05 to 0.1, max_depth 6 to 5, min_node_size 20 to 10, ntrees 500 to 200. Documented explicitly in ?fastgbm that training all ntrees rounds without validation/early_stopping reliably overfits on small-to-medium survival data, per the diagnostics.
• inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark.R now benchmarks all three implemented objectives (fastgbm_cox, fastgbm_aft, fastgbm_pexp) as separate arms against gbm/xgboost/ranger, not just Cox.
• Explored (not formalized into the package): an mtry-scaled-to-sqrt(p)/p default helped on higher-p datasets but hurt on low-p ones; a bagged-ensemble-of-fastgbm-fits wrapper (bootstrap resampling + averaging, directly borrowing ranger's core variance-reduction mechanism) closed the C-index gap to ranger on some datasets (e.g. beat it on pbc) but not others. See Roadmap in paper/fastgbm-benchmark.qmd.

New objective: piecewise exponential (objective = "pexp")

• Added a piecewise-exponential (PEM) objective. Unlike Cox/AFT (one scalar score per subject), pexp models the log hazard rate jointly over covariates and time: training data is expanded into person-time rows via the standard "Poisson trick" (fastgbm_expand_person_time(), R/pexp.R), with log(interval midpoint) appended as an extra feature, and the ensemble is fit with an ordinary Poisson-with-offset gradient/Hessian (compute_pexp_grad_hess()/compute_pexp_loss(), src/fastgbm.cpp) -- no derivative-of-the-ensemble approximation is needed, unlike a Royston-Parmar- style spline baseline, because the hazard is directly exp(pred) rather than a spline whose local slope must be estimated.
• Cutpoints default to pexp_bins = 10L quantiles of the observed event times (fastgbm_pexp_cutpoints()).
• predict(type = "survival") evaluates the hazard-over-time surface directly at the requested times (piecewise-linear cumulative hazard, extrapolated past the last cutpoint by holding the final interval's hazard rate constant). predict(type = "link"/"response") uses the cumulative hazard at the model's full fitted time horizon as a fixed risk score (no single "linear predictor" exists the way Cox/AFT have one, since the model is a function of time).
• Validated per this project's own rule against undocumented new losses: finite-difference gradient/Hessian check (tests/testthat/test-gradients.R), a Poisson-GLM-on-expanded-data equivalence check against the coefficient coxph recovers on the same synthetic proportional-hazards data (tests/testthat/test-pexp.R), and end-to-end tests for missing-value handling, early stopping, thread-count determinism, serialization, and the formula interface (same coverage bar as Cox/AFT).
• Bug fix (found while building pexp, applies to all objectives): the compiled backend read feature names from a nonexistent "colnames" attribute on the input matrix (R matrices store column names under dimnames(x)[[2]], not a top-level "colnames" attribute), so importance() always showed generic V1, V2, ... labels regardless of the matrix's actual colnames(). Fixed in src/fastgbm.cpp.
• RMST-oriented loss and a Royston-Parmar-style objective remain undesigned (see Roadmap in paper/fastgbm-benchmark.qmd); pexp was implemented first because it required no such approximation.

fastgbm 0.3.0

Error-analysis diagnostics and early stopping

• Added inst/benchmarks/error-analysis/diagnose.R: learning-curve, discordant-pair, and regularization diagnostics run against ranger on all 6 benchmark datasets. Found that test-set C-index consistently peaked between 10 and 100 boosting rounds and then degraded with further training on every dataset (e.g. pbc: train C-index 0.999 at 300 trees, test C-index peaked at 0.768 at 50 trees, down to 0.753 at the previous fixed default of 200) -- classic overfitting from having no way to stop early, and a secondary finding that ranking errors concentrate disproportionately in a few high-leverage subjects.
• Implemented validation-based early stopping (validation/early_stopping parameters previously accepted but ignored, per spec section 14): added compute_cox_loss()/compute_aft_loss() to src/fastgbm.cpp, extended fastgbm_fit_cpp() to bin a validation set with the training cuts, track validation loss per round, and stop after early_stopping rounds without improvement. fit$trees is truncated to the best-validation-loss iteration by default; the full run is preserved in fit$n_trees_grown, fit$validation_history, fit$best_iteration, and fit$stopping_reason. Verified deterministic across thread counts (tests/testthat/test-early-stopping.R).
• Changed colsample's default from 1 to 0.8, based on the diagnostic regularization probe showing small, consistently non-negative C-index gains.
• Rebenchmarked all 6 datasets with early stopping + the new colsample default: C-index improved on every dataset (e.g. colon_cancer 0.605 to 0.625), and training time dropped 4-10x since far fewer trees are actually grown -- fastgbm is now faster to train than xgboost on all 6 datasets (previously 4 of 6). ranger's discrimination lead narrowed but did not close.
• Repeated the regularization probe with early stopping active (it had only been run without it before) and found row subsampling gives a further, mostly-positive gain on top of colsample; changed subsample's default from 1 to 0.8 as well. Rebenchmarked again: fastgbm now beats both gbm and xgboost on C-index on 4 of 6 datasets (heart_failure 0.681/0.682 to 0.703, breast 0.648/0.648 to 0.677, crc_mondaca2020 0.558/0.553 to 0.568, and effectively ties gbm on pbc); the ranger gap narrowed further (breast: 5.9 points of C-index to 2.0) but did not close on any dataset.

fastgbm 0.2.0

Renamed from fastgbm; narrowed to survival-only

• Package renamed fastgbm → fastgbm. All identifiers, exported functions, and the compiled backend (src/fastgbm.cpp) were renamed to match.
• Removed reg:squarederror and binary:logistic objectives entirely: fastgbm is now survival-only. Objective strings simplified from "survival:cox"/ "survival:aft" to "cox"/"aft" (default "cox"). The plain-y-vector matrix/formula interface is gone; the response is always time/status or a survival::Surv object.
• Removed rmse(), logloss(), accuracy(), auroc(), and the pure-R squared-error/logistic reference implementation (tests/reference/) - no longer applicable now that the package only supports survival objectives.
• Added RcppParallel as a compiled dependency and parallelized the per-feature split search (SplitFinder worker in src/fastgbm.cpp): each feature's best split is computed independently and reduced via a fixed-order argmax, so training is bit-identical regardless of thread count. The existing threads parameter (0 = automatic) is now wired through to RcppParallel::parallelFor(); below an internal node/feature-count threshold, the same worker code runs serially instead (dispatch overhead isn't worth it for small nodes). See tests/testthat/test-parallel.R.
• Benchmark expanded from 2 to 6 survival datasets (pbc, heart_failure, breast, colon_cancer, crc_mondaca2020, framingham) and the non-survival benchmark arms (pima_diabetes, diabetes_prediction, maternal_bangladesh) were removed from inst/benchmarks/run-benchmark.R.
• NAMESPACE and all man/*.Rd files are now fully roxygen2-generated (previously hand-written) - run devtools::document() after any R-level API change, never edit NAMESPACE by hand.

Scientific-validity audit

• Bug fix: the AFT censored-observation gradient and Hessian had the wrong sign (grad = pdf/(sigma*sf) instead of -pdf/(sigma*sf)), which pushed boosting updates in the wrong direction for every censored AFT observation. Found via finite-difference tests against the negative log-likelihood.
• Bug fix: fastgbm_survival_baseline() (the Breslow baseline cumulative hazard used by predict(..., type = "survival") for Cox models) computed a risk set that only grew and never shrank over time, so the risk-set denominator was effectively constant at the total sample size for every event time instead of the correct shrinking at-risk set. This distorted every Cox survival-probability prediction. Found by comparing against survival::basehaz() on synthetic data; now matches exactly.
• Bug fix: metrics() computed the survival C-index using a risk-direction score for AFT models that was actually a predicted-time score (higher = longer survival, the opposite of "higher = more risk"), silently producing near-inverted concordance for AFT models. Fixed by negating the AFT linear predictor before scoring.
• Bug fix: importance() crashed (or silently returned garbage data-frame shapes) because the compiled backend never attached feature names to feature_importance; it now falls back to the model's feature_names.
• Bug fix: fastgbm() did not validate that nrow(x) matched length(y) (or length(time)/length(status)), leading to out-of-bounds memory reads and silently garbage predictions on mismatched input; this now raises a clear error.
• Added tests/testthat/test-gradients.R (finite-difference checks for all four objectives, via a new internal fastgbm_grad_hess() test hook onto the compiled kernels), test-survival-validity.R (Breslow baseline vs survival::basehaz, Cox ranking vs coxph), test-missing.R, and test-safeguards.R.
• Added a pure-R exact-greedy binary:logistic reference implementation (reference_logistic_fit()) alongside the existing squared-error one.

fastgbm 0.1.0

• Initial package scaffold.
• Added a compiled gradient boosting backend for squared-error regression and binary logistic classification.
• Added formula and matrix interfaces, prediction, importance, metrics, serialization, tests, and reference code.