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

Solving privacy issues with synthetic data

In certain fields, such as healthcare and finance, a lot of data is available, but the main obstacle is annotating and sharing the data. Even if we have a large-scale real dataset that is “perfectly” annotated, sometimes, we cannot share it with ML practitioners because it contains sensitive information that could be used by a third party to identify individuals or reveal critical information about businesses and organizations.

As we know, ML models cannot work without data, so what is the solution? A simple solution is to use the real data to generate synthetic data that we can share with others without any privacy issues while still representing the real data. We can utilize some synthetic data generation approaches to leverage the real dataset to generate a synthetic dataset that still represents the relationship between variables, hidden patterns, and associations in the real data while not revealing sensitive information...