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

What is synthetic data?

Synthetic data is artificially generated data: the data is not captured, measured, or recorded from the real world. Instead, algorithms or software were used to create or generate this data. Synthetic data can be generated by simulating natural phenomena using mathematical models or by applying some approximations of real-world processes. There are many approaches to generating synthetic data, such as leveraging game engines, such as Unreal and Unity, or utilizing statistical models, such as GANs and diffusion models. As we know, ML models require large-scale training datasets for training and evaluation. Collecting and annotating these datasets is extremely time-consuming, error-prone, and subject to privacy issues. Please refer to Chapters 2 and 3. Synthetic data is a powerful solution to address these previous limitations.

Synthetic data is useful for scenarios where collecting and annotating data is expensive, but its applications go beyond this particular...