Please post your tag synonym suggestions as new answers in this thread, one answer per suggestion. Upvote answers where you believe that the suggested tags should be made synonyms, and downvote answers where you believe the tags should remain separate. Well upvoted suggestions will be eventually implemented by the moderators (and then the corresponding answers will be deleted).
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asked Jun 7 '12 at 16:45
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8$\begingroup$ @whuber, if this is inappropriate or unhelpful, then I can delete it, but my goal is the opposite: I don't want you (or the other mods) to have to spend time thinking about this & doing a lot of extra research. I'm hoping to bring this to the attention of the community, which, by voting (commenting, etc), will have done all of that for you guys. Nb, w/ respect to lme & multilevel, I'm not sure anyone will have the requisite upvotes--there have only been 3 questions w/ multilevel, according to it's page. $\endgroup$ – gung - Reinstate Monica Jun 7 '12 at 16:59
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$\begingroup$ Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. $\endgroup$ – whuber♦ Jan 21 '16 at 14:55
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As a piece of software, xgboost is just one (popular) boosting library. However, it's not the only boosting software; we do not have tags for other individual boosting libraries like light-gbm, for instance.
stats.SE is not primarily oriented to debugging issues with statistical software, so it can be confusing to have tags for individual libraries as opposed to the underlying statistical procedures that those libraries implement.
The specific implementation choices that xgboost makes naturally have statistical and computational consequences, and it can be reasonable to ask about them, but I'm not sure we need to dedicate a tag for this boosting implementation (or, in general, every boosting implementation).
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$\begingroup$ It's sometimes hard to draw a clear demarcation between "libraries" (or packages or whatever), statistical software per se, and methods. How about scikit-learn or vowpal-wabbit, for instance? $\endgroup$ – chl Nov 9 '20 at 18:57
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1$\begingroup$ I appreciate the challenge -- we want tags to put like things together. And, at least in the case of
sklearn, it's so widespread as a standard part of the python-language data science software stack that it's almost unavoidable to want to create a tag for those posts. On the other hand, I have similarly mixed feelings about all software tags, including sklearn, because it can create the impression that CV.SE is a support website for software. "Why do you have the tag for __ if my question about a stack trace isn't on topic?" is a common enough complaint when we close a software question. $\endgroup$ – Sycorax♦ Nov 9 '20 at 19:43 -
$\begingroup$ I can understand. sklearn is probably to Python what ggplot2 (or the tidyverse nowadays) is to R ;-) Anyway, these were just some extreme examples, because I also asked myself the question for years. In this particular case (xgboost → boosting), however, I agree with you. $\endgroup$ – chl Nov 9 '20 at 20:07
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$\begingroup$ I'll make this change before the New Year if no one objects. $\endgroup$ – Sycorax♦ Nov 27 '20 at 2:06
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