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

Challenges and limitations of photorealistic synthetic data

In this section, you will explore the main challenges that hinder generating photorealistic synthetic data in practice. We will highlight the following limitations.

Creating hyper-realistic scenes

The real world is complex, diverse, and intricate with details. Scene elements in reality have various shapes, sophisticated dynamics, and highly non-linear interactions. Additionally, our vision and perception of the world are limited and subject to many factors, such as cognitive biases and color perception. Additionally, we may judge photorealism differently based on the context and evaluator. For example, what is more photorealistic, realistic foreground objects and a non-realistic background or the opposite? All these aspects together make generating highly realistic scenes rather hard in practice.

Resources versus photorealism trade-off

Budget, time, skills, and other factors limit the photorealism of the generated...