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

Predictive analytics issues with real data

In this section, you will learn about the main issues with real data-based predictive analytics solutions. Mainly, we will discuss the following three issues.

Partial and scarce training data

One of the main requirements of predictive analytics models to work well in practice is the availability of large-scale historical data. In sectors such as healthcare, banking, security, and manufacturing, it is not easy to find such datasets. The main reasons behind that are privacy concerns, regulations, and trade secrets. As we know, without sufficient training datasets, ML algorithms simply cannot work well in practice. Thus, predictive analytics methods based on real data work well only in certain fields where data is available. Therefore, augmenting real data with synthetic data can complement small-sized and incomplete real datasets. Thus, it solves one of the main issues of real datasets in these fields, as we will see in the next section...