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

Using synthetic data to solve time and efficiency issues

Automatic data generation of synthetic data removes many unnecessary elements in the real data curation and annotation pipeline. Collecting real data often requires special equipment, such as high-resolution cameras, microphones, or LiDAR. At the same time, you need engineers and technicians who are trained to use such equipment. You lose time and money training engineers and buying or renting this equipment. Often, data curators need to travel and visit various locations to collect suitable data, meaning that you would have to pay for transportation, accommodation, insurance, and more.

Synthetic data is an effective solution for these issues (see Figure 5.4). In addition to the preceding issues, it is easy to conclude that synthetic data has a lower carbon footprint than real data. Thus, it is even better for the environment!

Data annotation is one of the main issues that makes real datasets cumbersome. Annotating large...