Information on the 5d level centroid shift (ε c ) of rare-earth ions is critical for determining the chemical shift and the Coulomb repulsion parameter as well as predicting the luminescence and thermal response of rare-earth substituted inorganic phosphors. The magnitude of ε c depends on the binding strength between the rare-earth ion and its coordinating ligands, which is difficult to quantify a priori and makes phosphor design particularly challenging. In this work, a tree-based ensemble learning algorithm employing extreme gradient boosting (XGB) is trained to predict ε c by analyzing the optical properties of 160 Ce 3+ substituted inorganic phosphors. The experimentally measured ε c of these compounds was featurized using the materials' relative permittivity (ε r ), average electronegativity, average polarizability, and local geometry. Because the number of reported ε r values is limited, it was necessary to utilize a predicted relative permittivity (ε r,SVR ) obtained from a support vector regressor trained on data from ~2,800 density functional theory calculations. The remaining features were compiled from open-source databases and by analyzing the rare-earth coordination environment from each Crystallographic Information File (CIF). The resulting ensemble model could reliably estimate ε c and provides insight into the optical properties of Ce 3+ -activated inorganic phosphors.