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

Domain-specific issues limiting the usability of 
synthetic data

In addition to general issues that limit the usability of synthetic data in practice, there are also domain-specific issues related to that. In this section, we explore these common domain-specific issues limiting the usability of synthetic data. Let’s study synthetic data usability issues in the following three fields: healthcare, finance, and autonomous cars.

Healthcare

ML in healthcare requires large-scale training data. Usually, the data is unstructured, comes from different sensors and sources, is longitudinal (data collected over a long period), is highly imbalanced, and contains sensitive information. The illnesses and diseases that patients suffer from are diverse and complex and depend on a multitude of factors, such as genes, geographic location, medical conditions, and occupation. Thus, to generate useful synthetic training data in the healthcare field, domain experts are usually needed...