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When you train your XGBoost regression model, you can obtain feature importances by using:

model.get_score(importance_type="gain")

Although I tried to reconstruct the value and have done some research on it, I am still struggling to figure out, how gain is computed in XGBoost?

It is partially explained here: Relative variable importance for Boosting

But this is focused on classification. And even though there is a link saying that squared error with Friedman's improvement score is used, I have not reached the same numbers.

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  • $\begingroup$ I need to edit that answer of mine. In fact, regression trees are always used in boosting. So it is subtly incorrect. $\endgroup$
    – Matthew Drury
    Sep 7, 2017 at 14:42

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After all it seems that gain is computed in quite complicated manner and it's explanation can be found at https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/model.html at the bottom of the page.

Gain is a metric defined by XGBoost and it also involves evaluation of the structure of the tree.

Due to the complexity of the explanation, it is not copied in here.

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