Book Image

Synthetic Data for Machine Learning

By : Abdulrahman Kerim
Book Image

Synthetic Data for Machine Learning

By: Abdulrahman Kerim

Overview of this book

The machine learning (ML) revolution has made our world unimaginable without its products and services. However, training ML models requires vast datasets, which entails a process plagued by high costs, errors, and privacy concerns associated with collecting and annotating real data. Synthetic data emerges as a promising solution to all these challenges. This book is designed to bridge theory and practice of using synthetic data, offering invaluable support for your ML journey. Synthetic Data for Machine Learning empowers you to tackle real data issues, enhance your ML models' performance, and gain a deep understanding of synthetic data generation. You’ll explore the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, gaining practical knowledge with hands-on examples of modern methods, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models. Additionally, you’ll uncover the secrets and best practices to harness the full potential of synthetic data. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered synthetic data and positioned yourself as a market leader, ready for more advanced, cost-effective, and higher-quality data sources, setting you ahead of your peers in the next generation of ML.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1:Real Data Issues, Limitations, and Challenges
5
Part 2:An Overview of Synthetic Data for Machine Learning
8
Part 3:Synthetic Data Generation Approaches
13
Part 4:Case Studies and Best Practices
18
Part 5:Current Challenges and Future Perspectives

Generating synthetic data using video games

This synthetic data generation approach transfers the problem from creating virtual worlds to generate synthetic data to manipulating a video game to generate synthetic data instead. This method presents a convenient and efficient way to generate synthetic data. Examples of video games that have been leveraged for this purpose are listed as follows:

  • Grand Theft Auto V: Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.02192v1.pdf)
  • Minecraft: Exploring the Impacts from Datasets to Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) Models with MineNavi (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.08454.pdf)
  • Half-Life 2: OVVV: Using Virtual Worlds to Design and Evaluate Surveillance Systems (https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/cvpr/2007/04270516/12OmNyRg4Dv)

The following diagram shows the varied genres of video games:

Figure 8.2 – Examples of video game genres

Figure 8.2 – Examples of video game genres

The diversity...