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

The domain gap problem in ML

In this section, we will understand what the domain gap is and why it is a problem in ML. The domain gap is one of the main issues that limit the usability of synthetic data in practice. It usually refers to the dissimilarity between the distributions and properties of data in two or more domains. It is not just associated with synthetic data. However, it is a common problem in ML. It is very common to notice a degradation in the performance of ML models when tested on similar but slightly different datasets. For more information, please refer to Who is closer: A computational method for domain gap evaluation (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2021.108293).

The main reasons for the domain gap between datasets can be linked to the following:

  • Sensitivity to sensors’ variations
  • Discrepancy in class and feature distributions
  • Concept drift

Let’s discuss each of these points in more detail.

Sensitivity to sensors’...