XGBoost vs LightGBM: Benchmarking Tabular Data Processing Speed & Accuracy

Tree Growth Strategies

XGBoost traditionally uses level-wise (depth-wise) tree growth, while LightGBM uses leaf-wise tree growth with best-first splitting, significantly accelerating convergence on large datasets.

References & Further Reading:

• LightGBM Documentation & Benchmark Suite
• XGBoost Official Guide