ValueError: feature_names mismatch: in xgboost in the predict() function

Question

I have trained an XGBoostRegressor model. When I have to use this trained model for predicting for a new input, the predict() function throws a feature_names mismatch error,

Answer 1

Check the exception. What you should see are two arrays. One is the column names of the dataframe you’re passing in and the other is the XGBoost feature names. They should be the same length. If you put them side by side in an Excel spreadsheet you will see that they are not in the same order. My guess is that the XGBoost names were written to a dictionary so it would be a coincidence if the names in then two arrays were in the same order.

The fix is easy. Just reorder your dataframe columns to match the XGBoost names:

f_names = model.feature_names
df = df[f_names]