Exploring variables to guide xgboost tuning In short: How to think about the type and distribution of my variables when choosing parameter values for xgboost?
Context: I have a dataset which I want to classify using the binary:logistic objective (I am using the R implementation). I wonder if visually inspecting variables in my dataset could inform selection of parameters values, and if so then how does one generally go about it.
Example: A dataset with a binary outcome variable and a mixture of binary/continuous predictors.
Outcome variable (one value per observation):

A set of predictors called flavours (~150 variables) and textures (~80 variables) have binary values 0, 1. Each observation has one or multiple flavours and textures (number of f/t per observation on the horizontal axis):

Some flavours/textures occur much more likely than others (frequency on horizontal axis):

I added some quantitative variables to summarise flavour/texture for each observation. I calculated a frequency for each f/t (= what is the percentage of observations where this f/t occurs) and then calculated min (most unique f/t in the given observation) max (most common f/t) and mean (average frequency).

Apart from that, there are three more continuous variables:

What conclusions regarding model parameters one might draw from this, if any?
A tip: Dont
A trick:Dont
The reason? Machine learning scientific methodology is based on cross-validation. Almost all papers (and i put the almost because of yes) select everything based on cross-validation and not in previous knowledge.
Xgboost is particularly more complicated because it has a lot of math involved.
For a simpler case, lets say that you have a problem with 3 features and you want to use a Lasso regression. Which hyperparameter will you choose? Even in this really simple case you don't know. You will need to do CV and select them there.
For xgboost the only tip that I can provide based on my experience is that the only important hyperparameter is the number of trees on the ensembling. The rest seems not to be so important.
My recommendation: only tune number of trees in the xgboost and select the best in cross-validation. Unless you want to find the absolute minime, that then, you are going to explore the whooooole hyperspace. Good luck!