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

History of synthetic data

In this section, we will learn about the evolution of synthetic data. Basically, we can categorize the use of synthetic data into the following categories, which may not reflect the chronological order, as it is very hard to track the early uses of synthetic data for each category.

Random number generators

Random number generators are one of the simplest forms of synthetic data. Assume you are training an ML model to recognize faces. Let us say you have only a limited number of images. You can add, for example, random noise to the original images to create new synthetic ones. The implementation of random noise is possible through the utilization of random number generators. This will help the face recognizer ML model to learn how the person’s face changes under certain types of noise (see Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 – Utilizing random number generators to generate synthetic images

Figure 4.3 – Utilizing random number generators to generate synthetic images

Next, we’ll learn about...