lightgbm

4.7.0

Light Gradient Boosting Machine

35packages depend

102.2Kdownloads / year

54.7%test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by James LambFirst published 2020-09-2118 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Tree based algorithms can be improved by introducing boosting frameworks. 'LightGBM' is one such framework, based on Ke, Guolin et al. (2017) https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/hash/6449f44a102fde848669bdd9eb6b76fa-Abstract.html. This package offers an R interface to work with it. It is designed to be distributed and efficient with the following advantages: 1. Faster training speed and higher efficiency. 2. Lower memory usage. 3. Better accuracy. 4. Parallel learning supported. 5. Capable of handling large-scale data. In recognition of these advantages, 'LightGBM' has been widely-used in many winning solutions of machine learning competitions. Comparison experiments on public datasets suggest that 'LightGBM' can outperform existing boosting frameworks on both efficiency and accuracy, with significantly lower memory consumption. In addition, parallel experiments suggest that in certain circumstances, 'LightGBM' can achieve a linear speed-up in training time by using multiple machines.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("lightgbm", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("lightgbm-org/LightGBM")

Development version from lightgbm-org/LightGBM. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-lightgbm

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-lightgbm

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-lightgbm

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 15.6 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 1.25

54.7%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-07-27
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
WARNING2026-03-10
9 OK · 3 NOTE · 2 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 2,099 wordsVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 0%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 93%
References docs: 8%

Downloads

102.2K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #1,456 · ~280/day · ~8.5K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

6.8K30 days

20.5K90 days

102.2K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on4.6K r2u32 autocran11.6K conda_forge40 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ lightgbm-org/lightgbm

18,644Stars

4,045Forks

443Open issues

65Open PRs

35Releases

3,855Commits

352Contributors

gbdtgbmmachine-learningdata-miningdistributedlightgbmgbrtdecision-trees

License MIT · 3,855 commits · Last activity 2026-07-29 · +0.4% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2026-07-19 · 18,5782026-07-29 · 18,644

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

10 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 5 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/lightgbm-org/lightgbm on 2026-07-30.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Automation and maintenance (2)

Dependabotpre-commit

Lint, format, editor (1)

EditorConfig

Governance and community (3)

Issue templatesSecurity policyCODEOWNERS

Show all practices

Git structural (3)

.gitattributesSubmodulesblame-ignore revs

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

7 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 4.0

Imports (8)

R6 data.tablegraphicsjsonlite (>= 1.0)Matrixmethodsparallelutils

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (4)

knitr markdown RhpcBLASctl testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

35direct

0indirect

Code & Tests

People & History

People (21)

Maintainer (1)

James Lamb

Author, Maintainer

Authors (13)

James Lamb

Author, Maintainer

Wei Chen

Author

David Cortes

Author · added in 3.3.0

Author

Author

Author

Author

Author

Author · added in 3.3.0

Damien Soukhavong

Author

Nikita Titov

Author · added in 3.3.0

Taifeng Wang

Author

Qiwei Ye

Author

Contributors (5)

IBM Corporation

Contributor · added in 3.0.0.2

Alberto Ferreira

Contributor · added in 3.2.0

Daniel Lemire

Contributor · added in 3.2.0

Michael Mayer

Contributor · added in 4.2.0

Yachen Yan

Contributor

Dropbox, Inc.

Microsoft Corporation

Victor Zverovich

Listed in earlier versions (3)

Dave Daeschler

no longer listed · 3.0.0.2 to 3.3.5

Jay Loden

no longer listed · 3.0.0.2 to 3.3.5

Giampaolo Rodola

no longer listed · 3.0.0.2 to 3.3.5

Package Timeline

18 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

4.7.0Latest
2026-07-19 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
4.6.0
2025-02-13 · diff ↗
4.5.0
2024-07-26 · diff ↗
4.4.0
2024-06-15 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
4.3.0
2024-01-18 · diff ↗
4.2.0
2023-12-08 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
3.3.5
2023-01-16 · diff ↗
3.3.4
2022-12-16 · diff ↗
3.3.3
2022-10-10 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
3.3.2
2022-01-14 · diff ↗
3.3.1
2021-10-30 · diff ↗

Show 13 earlier events

unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2021-10-30
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2021-10-25
check problems were not corrected in time
3.3.0
2021-10-09 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
3.2.1
2021-04-13 · diff ↗
3.2.0
2021-03-22 · diff ↗
3.1.1
2020-12-08 · diff ↗
3.1.0
2020-11-19 · diff ↗
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2020-11-19
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2020-10-02
corrupting R's memory See the valgrind report of out-of-bounds write
3.0.0.2
2020-10-01 · diff ↗
3.0.0
2020-09-21
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2020-09-21
Total releases: 18 / 6 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.0
Bundled data: 128 KB / 3 files
Download size: 1.6 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Appears in task views

Machine Learning & Statistical Learning Model Deployment with R

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