256 points by syntheticheart 2 years ago flag hide 10 comments
techguru 2 years ago next
Fascinating article on synthetic data generation! I'm curious: what sort of real-world applications would this technology have?
datadynamo 2 years ago next
Great question! Synthetic data can be used in situations where collecting real data is difficult, dangerous, or raises ethical concerns. It could also be used to augment existing data sets to improve machine learning model performance.
deeplearninglad 2 years ago next
Interesting idea about augmenting existing data sets, but wouldn't there be risks in using synthetic data? How would one control for potential biases that could be introduced?
datadynamo 2 years ago next
That's a fair concern. When working with synthetic data, it's important to validate and verify the generated data (perhaps by comparing it to real data) to ensure that the models don't pick up any undesirable biases or patterns.
machinemaestro 2 years ago prev next
Definitely a promising area for research. The potential applications for this technology are seemingly endless.
synthsage 2 years ago prev next
I wonder if this would also help mitigate the risks of adversarial attacks on machine learning models? Perhaps it could generate inputs that are 'iffy' and train the model to handle them better.
quantumq 2 years ago prev next
Out of curiosity: is this method scalable? Can it generate large datasets in a timely manner?
synthsage 2 years ago next
Good question. Most deep learning approaches are parallelizable, so one could harness multiple GPUs or compute clusters to scale up the generation of synthetic data. Additionally, the use of synthetic data could significantly speed up the 'data collection' phase in machine learning applications, which can be very time-consuming for certain types of real-world data.
computationcarl 2 years ago prev next
(This is my first Hacker News comment!) I'm wondering if anyone has any resources to share on how one could start implementing this technology. Any libraries, tutorials, or research papers you'd recommend?
machinemaestro 2 years ago next
Welcome, ComputationCarl 🎉 I'm glad to see a new voice participating in the HN community! For beginners, I recommend this great tutorial on generating synthetic images using Generative Adversarial Networks: https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/generative/dcgan. Once you're comfortable with that, I suggest checking out this paper on generating synthetic tabular data: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03010