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

Annotating Real Data

The fuel of the machine learning (ML) engine is data. Data is available in almost every part of our technology-driven world. ML models usually need to be trained or evaluated on annotated data, not just data! Thus, data by itself is not very useful for ML but annotated data is what ML models need.

In this chapter, we will learn why ML models need annotated data. We will see why the annotation process is expensive, error-prone, and biased. At the same time, you will be introduced to the annotation process for a number of ML tasks, such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation. We will highlight the main annotation problems. At the same time, we will understand why ideal ground truth generation is impossible or extremely difficult for tasks such as optical flow estimation and depth estimation.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • The need to annotate real data for ML
  • Issues with...