Solve Data Scarcity For Using of Artificial Intelligence

Businesses are swimming and drowning in data in the new age of employment. However, it's both humorous and ironic that they're having trouble finding enough high-quality data for testing and analytics. Companies rely on data for decision-making, but obtaining high-quality data in the proper amount can be difficult. Determining the appropriate volume of data for analytics and addressing data scarcity are critical steps in implementing Artificial Intelligence.
May 11, 2022

The influence of insufficient data on the performance of AI models is always a problem for data scientists. It's difficult to say how much data is needed to create an excellent AI model with the maximum level of accuracy. The amount of data required is determined by a number of factors, including the problem statement's complexity, the number of categories to predict, and the technique used to solve the problem. Data scientists apply their expertise and a variety of cutting-edge methodologies to estimate the least amount of data required for AI. 

Data scarcity is when  there is a limited amount or a complete lack of labeled training data, or lack of data for a given label compared to the other labels (data imbalance). Larger technological firms typically have access to more data, yet they may face data imbalance. The lack of labeled training data is a common problem for smaller technological enterprises. Here are some methods for answering problems related to Data Scarcity:

Determining Data Volume

The following are the most commonly used methods for determining data volume.

  1. Learning Curve Conceptualization

The training data sample size determines the computational cost of training a model. While a large dataset is ideal for training the model, the model's performance accuracy decreases as sample size grows. While a larger dataset trains the model in real-time, the learning-curve sampling method constantly checks and compares costs and performance. When the expenses outweigh the advantages, the training is completed. Depending on the dataset and application, the cost-benefit analysis method may differ.

  1. Published Research on a Problem Statement That Is Similar

It's getting easier to find a previously solved problem with data that's similar to the complexity at hand. Academic and industry-related research material is becoming more widely available, while open online communities such as Kaggle and GitHub are becoming increasingly popular. Such resources provide information on data set needs, cleaning and scaling standards, and AI model performance. These insights are particularly useful in determining the sample size necessary for enterprises.

  1. Algorithm Types

A smaller sample size is required for a few machine learning algorithms than for others. In comparison to linear algorithms, non-linear algorithms typically require a bigger training dataset. Some deep learning algorithms improve their skill, accuracy, and performance when trained with more data while working with non-linear algorithms. Non-linear algorithms, such as neural networks, random forest, AdaBoost, and others, require 1000s of observations to attain acceptable performance and are more computationally intensive.

  1. Obtaining as much data as possible

A larger dataset that covers all conceivable scenarios in abundance is recommended regardless of the model. Machine learning is an inductive process, so it's best to incorporate edge cases in the training dataset to avoid model failure and inaccuracy. Some difficulties may necessitate the use of enormous data, and in some cases, all of your data. Regardless of the methods used, having as much data as possible is always beneficial.

Data Generation to Solve the Problem of Insufficient Data

According to Gartner, 60% of data required to develop AI and analytics projects would be synthetically generated by 2024. Instead of being taken from genuine events, synthetic data is manufactured intentionally. By extracting the statistical features of the source dataset, synthetic data enhances the dataset's volume and matches the sample data. Synthetic data has a number of other advantages, like improving the robustness of the AI model and ensuring data privacy. Every day, businesses deal with very sensitive data, which typically includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI). Synthetic data aids in the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) and the development of high-performing and accurate AI models.

Synthetic data is frequently used by data scientists to address data deficiencies and improve data quality. Several regulations limit how companies gather, share, and dispose of personal information. Organizations, on the other hand, can share data easily and legally using synthetic data generating techniques.

How to Manage Data Scarcity?

  1. Getting Started with Heuristics

Heuristics have a number of benefits:

  • They don't require a lot of data and can be made with just your intuition or subject expertise.
  • They are quite easy to understand. Looking at the code or logging the code path that was triggered for a certain query can usually answer the question "why did a model forecast something as spam?"
  • They are generally free of the issues and complications that plague a traditional machine learning pipeline: data skew, code skew, model staleness, sensitivity to fluctuation in feature distribution, and so on.

The weights in the heuristic model can be adjusted until the news feed's qualitative analysis looks to be optimal. This strategy is effective in getting the product off the ground. As more data becomes available, intuition/domain knowledge can be merged with data insights to fine-tune the heuristic model even further. Once you have enough user interaction data, you may apply logistic regression to find the best weights. Following that, you'll need to put up a model retraining process. As your setup becomes more sophisticated, you'll need to pay more attention to factors like data quality, model performance quality, and so on.

  1. Using APIs from External

There are situations where state-of-the-art techniques are required for a product-specific problem and heuristics are not an option to begin with. Object recognition in images, for example: given an image, identify people, animals, buildings, automobiles, and so on. Several API providers, like AWS Recognition and Google Cloud's Vision AI, offer APIs that may be used to recognize objects in photos, conduct face recognition, detect text from an image, and so on. Breaking down your problem in a way that makes use of these APIs can help you get started.

This route is simpler to implement than the alternative, which involves creating a model that can recognize specific shoe brands based on an input image. Given the availability of free tiers from popular API providers, the financial effects are usually minor.

  1. Synthetic Data

In machine learning, synthetic data is used to collect cases that aren't present in the training dataset but are theoretically plausible. When developing an object recognition application, for example, a user might point the camera towards an object (say, a deer) at an angle rather than directly at it. The original object image can be rotated and placed into the dataset as a new example with the same label in order to accurately detect the object. This would aid the model's understanding that an image taken from a different perspective represents the same thing.

Conclusion

One of the key impediments for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reach production levels is data scarcity. The answer is simple: data, or the lack thereof, is the number one reason why AI/NLU programs fail. As a result, the AI community is working feverishly to find a solution. In many application disciplines, such as marketing, computer vision, and medical science, there is a restricted collection of data accessible for training neural networks since gathering additional data is either not practical or needs more resources. To avoid the problem of overfitting, these models require a vast amount of data.

In answering this data-related problem, it is actually at the point of data documentation and good data utilization. Data Scarcity is actually an issue that has existed for a long time and is growing in technology trends like now. The use of AI, especially Machine Leaning, with processing and generating data automatically will bring a solution to this problem.

Written by Denny Fardian
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