catboost/catboost v0.17

on GitHub

New features:

• Sparse data support
• We've implemented and set to default boost_from_average in RMSE mode. It gives a boost in quality especially for a small number of iterations.

Improvements:

• Quantile regression on CPU
• default parameters for Poisson regression

Speedups:

• A number of speedups for training on CPU
• Huge speedups for loading datasets with categorical features represented as pandas.Categorical.
  Hint: use pandas.Categorical instead of object to speed up loading up to 200x.