Articles on: Basic concepts

Synthetic data

Synthetic data in machine learning refers to artificially generated data used to train and evaluate models. It is typically used when real-world data is limited, expensive, or private. Synthetic data can be generated by simulating real-world data or by creating new data that is similar to the real-world data.

Synthetic data has several benefits in machine learning:

Increased data size: Synthetic data can be used to increase the size of the training dataset, which can help to improve the performance of the model. You can also implement other data augmentation techniques to artificially manipulate a dataset. For instance, you can randomly flip, crop, or shift some images in your dataset to have a more diverse and inclusive images.

Balancing data: Synthetic data can be used to balance the dataset when the target variable is imbalanced, which can help to avoid overfitting and improve the performance of the model.

Privacy: Synthetic data can be used to protect sensitive information when real-world data is private or confidential.

Debugging and testing: Synthetic data can be used to test and debug the model, as well as to evaluate its performance on new, unseen data.

In summary, synthetic data can be a useful tool in machine learning when real-world data is limited or when privacy concerns exist. It can help to improve the performance of the model and to overcome challenges in the data. However, it's important to ensure that the synthetic data is representative of the real-world data and to evaluate the performance of the model on real-world data when possible.

Updated on: 02/02/2023

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