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

Synthetic data as a revolutionary solution for rare data

Rare data occurs in the real world because of infrequent events or phenomena. In other words, these events occur but with low frequency. We can broadly classify these events into these categories:

  • Natural catastrophes: This category includes events such as floods, asteroid impacts, earthquakes, and tsunamis
  • Anthropogenic: This category includes events such as industrial accidents, financial crises, and violent conflicts

These events create many major changes in the environment, which may cause state-of-the-art ML models to fail. For example, a face recognition system may not work well in the case of the evacuation of a building because as the building becomes more crowded, movement patterns may change. While these events are rare, their impacts on societies are tremendous. ML models that function inappropriately may greatly increase the number of deaths and injuries.

For ML models to be robust and accurate...