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

Looking at two case studies

In this section, we will briefly discuss two well-known simulators for synthetic data generation, and comment on the potential of using these approaches.

AirSim

AirSim is an open source, cross-platform simulator developed by Microsoft using the Unreal game engine. It simulates drones and cars, opening the door for enormous applications in computer vision for DL and RL approaches for autonomous driving. Some of the key features of this simulator include the following:

  • Various weather effects and conditions
  • LIDAR and infrared sensors
  • Customizable environment
  • Realistic physics, environments, and sensors

As you can see, AirSim can be leveraged to generate rich, large-scale, and high-quality synthetic data from various sensors. Researchers in ML can train their models to fuse the different data modalities to develop more robust autonomous driving algorithms. Additionally, AirSim provides automatically labeled synthetic data for...