XGBoost is short for “eXtreme Gradient Boosting.” The “eXtreme” refers to speed enhancements such as parallel computing and cache awareness that makes XGBoost approximately 10 times faster than traditional Gradient Boosting. In addition, XGBoost includes a unique split-finding algorithm to optimize trees, along with built-in regularization that reduces overfitting. Generally speaking, XGBoost is a faster, more accurate version of Gradient Boosting.