CatBoost Rust Package

Cargo Package

Cargo package can be found here

Historical Context

• This started off as an attempt to publish the catboost bindings to cargo
• Eventually decided to unofficially split out the code and maintain separate rust bindings, similar to onnxruntime-rs
• Note that this is voluntarily maintained and not yet endorsed by the official catboost team

Differences versus official rust package

• Necessary changes made to publish crate instead of referencing the git repo, which is pretty big
• The official catboost-sys one attempts to rebuild the shared library, whereas this one downloads it from the github release page.
• The build.rs script is with assumption libcatboost shared library already downloaded separately.
• Also marked the Model as Send so that it can be used across threads, due to the documentation stating it's thread safe. Note that this is not yet extensively tested though.
• As of the present the catboost version is hardcoded, it is currently 1.0.6.

If you need dependencies for bindgen

apt-get install -y curl build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev libclang-dev clang cmake

Install libcatboost

• Download catboost binary from https://github.com/catboost/catboost/releases/tag/v1.0.6.
  • If you are using Linux, download libcatboostmodel.so
  • If you are using MacOS, download libcatboostmodel.dylib
  • Place the file in /usr/lib/
  • Create a soft link to x.x.1, e.g. sudo ln -s libcatboostmodel.so libcatboostmodel.so.1

Basic usage example

1. Add a dependency to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
catboost-rs = "0.1.6"

2. To use catboost, it assumes the shared libraries are available. You will need to download the shared library from the official releases page. If you are using linux, download libcatboostmodel.so. If you are using Mac, download libcatboostmodel.dylib. As of the present, only version 1.0.6 is supported.
3. Move these libraries to /usr/lib
4. Now you can apply pretrained model in your code:

// Bring catboost module into the scope
use catboost_rs as catboost;

fn main() {
    // Load the trained model
    let model = catboost::Model::load("tmp/model.bin").unwrap();

    println!("Number of cat features {}", model.get_cat_features_count());
    println!("Number of float features {}", model.get_float_features_count());

    // Apply the model
    let prediction = model
        .calc_model_prediction(
            vec![
                vec![-10.0, 5.0, 753.0],
                vec![30.0, 1.0, 760.0],
                vec![40.0, 0.1, 705.0],
            ],
            vec![
                vec![String::from("north")],
                vec![String::from("south")],
                vec![String::from("south")],
            ],
        )
        .unwrap();
    println!("Prediction {:?}", prediction);
}

Documentation

Run cargo doc --open in catboost/rust-package directory.

Tests

Run cargo test in catboost/rust-package directory.