Path: blob/master/cloud/notebooks/python_sdk/converters/Use ONNX model converted from XGBoost.ipynb
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Use ONNX model converted from XGBoost with ibm-watsonx-ai
This notebook facilitates the ONNX
format, the XGBoost
library and the watsonx.ai Runtime
service. It contains steps and code to work with ibm-watsonx-ai library in order to convert the model to ONNX format. It also introduces commands necessary for trainining data, persisting and deploying the model and finally scoring it.
Some familiarity with Python is helpful. This notebook uses Python 3.11.
Learning goals
The learning goals of this notebook are:
Train an XGBoost model.
Convert the XGBoost model to the ONNX format.
Persist the converted model in the watsonx.ai repository.
Deploy model for online scoring using the APIClient instance.
Score sample records using the APIClient instance.
Contents
This notebook contains the following parts:
1. Setting up the environment
Before you use the sample code in this notebook, you must perform the following setup tasks:
Create a watsonx.ai Runtime instance (information on service plans and further reading can be found here)
1.1. Installing and importing the ibm-watsonx-ai
and dependencies
Before you use the sample code in this notebook, install the following packages:
ibm-watsonx-ai
scikit-learn
xgboost
ONNX-related packages
Note: ibm-watsonx-ai
documentation can be found here.
1.2. Connecting to the watsonx.ai Runtime
Authenticate with the watsonx.ai Runtime service on IBM Cloud. You need to provide platform api_key
and instance location
.
You can use IBM Cloud CLI to retrieve platform API Key and instance location.
API Key can be generated in the following way:
Get the value of api_key
from the output.
Location of your watsonx.ai Runtime instance can be retrieved in the following way:
Get the value of location
from the output.
Tip: You can generate your Cloud API key
by going to the Users section of the Cloud console. From that page, click your name, scroll down to the API Keys section, and click Create an IBM Cloud API key. Give your key a name and click Create, then copy the created key and paste it below. You can also get a service-specific url by going to the Endpoint URLs section of the watsonx.ai Runtime docs. You can check your instance location in your watsonx.ai Runtime Service instance details.
You can also get the service specific apikey by going to the Service IDs section of the Cloud Console. From that page, click Create, then copy the created key, and paste it below.
Action: Enter your api_key
and location
in the following cells.
If you are running this notebook on Cloud, you can access the location
via:
1.3. Working with spaces
First of all, you need to create a space that will be used for your work. If you do not have space already created, you can use Deployment Spaces Dashboard to create one.
Click New Deployment Space
Create an empty space
Select Cloud Object Storage
Select Watson Machine Learning instance and press Create
Copy
space_id
and paste it below
Tip: You can also use the ibm_watsonx_ai
SDK to prepare the space for your work. More information can be found here.
Action: Assign space ID below
You can use the list
method to print all existing spaces.
To be able to interact with all resources available in watsonx.ai Runtime, you need to set space which you will be using.
In this section, you will train a simple XGBoost
model.
2.1 Loading the iris data
2.2. Training the XGBoost model
3.1. Converting the model
Note: To convert a scikit-learn pipeline with an XGBoost model refer to the documentation.
Every classifier, by design, produces two outputs: the predicted label and the probability distribution across all possible labels.
As you can see, the predicted values are consistent with those calculated in the evaluation section.
4. Persisting the converted ONNX model
In this section, you will learn how to store your converted ONNX model in watsonx.ai Runtime.
Define model name, type and software spec.
Save the info to an archive.
4.1. Publishing the ONNX model to the watsonx.ai Runtime repository
Now you can print an online scoring endpoint.
Use client.deployments.score()
method to run scoring.
Let's see the predictions result
As you can see, the predicted values are consistent with those calculated in the evaluation section.
6. Cleaning up
If you want to clean up after the notebook execution, i.e. remove any created assets like:
experiments
trainings
pipelines
model definitions
models
functions
deployments
please follow up this sample notebook.
7. Summary and next steps
You successfully completed this notebook! You learned how to use ONNX, XGBoost package as well as watsonx.ai Runtime for model creation and deployment. Check out our Online Documentation for more samples, tutorials, documentation, how-tos, and blog posts.
Copyright © 2025 IBM. This notebook and its source code are released under the terms of the MIT License.