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

Diffusion models – the pros and cons

In this section, you will learn about and examine the main pros and cons of using DMs for synthetic data generation. This will help you to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each synthetic data generation method. Consequently, it will give you the wisdom to select the best approach for your own problems.

As we learned in Chapter 7, GANs work very well for certain applications, such as style transfer and image-to-image translation, but they are usually very hard to train and unstable. Additionally, the generated synthetic samples are usually less diverse and photorealistic. Conversely, recent papers have shown that DM-based synthetic data generation approaches surpass GANs on many benchmarks. For more details, please refer to Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.05233.pdf). Like any other synthetic data generation approach, DMs have pros and cons. Thus, you need to consider them carefully for...