LightGBM and CatBoost
Why LightGBM is faster, histogram-based splitting, CatBoost for categorical features.
Beyond XGBoost
XGBoost is powerful but can be slow on very large datasets. LightGBM and CatBoost are newer gradient boosting libraries that improve speed and handle categorical data more gracefully.
Histogram-Based Splits
LightGBM buckets continuous features into discrete bins (a histogram) before finding splits. This makes split-finding much faster and uses less memory than the exact method.