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pythonpython-3.xxgboost

Getting UnicodeDecodeError when using shap on xgboost

I'm trying to use shap on xgboost model, but getting error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 341: invalid start byte

example:

model = XGBClassifier()
model.fit(X_train, y_train)
explainer = shap.TreeExplainer(model)

package versions:

    python == 3.6.9
    xgboost==1.1.0
    shap==0.35.0

What is the problem and how can we fix it ?

Solution

  • There seems to be a bug in the system. See: https://github.com/slundberg/shap/issues/1215. The issue seems to be resolved, but perhaps the fix is not yet released. At any rate, I had the same issue and resolved it temporarily by installing xgboost v1.0.0.