---
title: Poisson optimization metric
description: When to use Poisson as the optimization metric for a project and why.
---

# Poisson optimization metric {: #poisson-optimization-metric }

<span style="color:red;font-size: 1rem"> `Robot 1`</span>

Hello team, other than setting up the project as a regression problem, do we have any suggestions for the following?

1. **Does DR have any plans to explicitly support modeling count data?**
2. **How does DR suggest customers model counts if they want to use the platform?**
        

This has come up a few times (and in another project yesterday, where the response is a count, and they ignore this and just upload and model as regression).

<span style="color:red;font-size: 1rem"> `Robot 1`</span>

The real question I’m asking is **whether any of the blueprints that hint at modeling counts actually model counts?** I think the XGB + Poisson loss ones do. Also, the GLMs-based blueprints (like elastic net and such) naturally support Poisson/NB distributions, but wasn’t sure if DataRobot supported those or not?

<span style="color:red;font-size: 1rem"> `Robot 2`</span>

Use Poisson as the [project metric](additional#change-the-optimization-metric)! DataRobot has great support for count data.  You don’t need to worry about logging the data: we handle the link function for you.

We have Poisson GLMs, Poisson XGBoost, and Poisson neural networks for modeling count data! They work great!
:raised_hands:

<span style="color:red;font-size: 1rem"> `Robot 2`</span>

We also support weights, offsets, and exposure for projects that model counts (e.g., projects using poisson loss).
:pray:

<span style="color:red;font-size: 1rem"> `Robot 3`</span>

I bet that just loading the data into our platform and hitting start will do the trick 9/10 times. Based on the EDA analysis of the target, sometimes the recommended optimization metric will already be set up for you.
@`Robot 2` thoughts?

<span style="color:red;font-size: 1rem"> `Robot 2`</span>

I agree!
