Synthetic data for AI

Last year, researchers at Data Science Nigeria noted that engineers looking to train computer-vision algorithms could choose from a wealth of data sets featuring Western clothing, but there were none for African clothing. The team addressed the imbalance by using AI to generate artificial images of African fashion--a whole new data set from scratch. Such synthetic data sets--computer-generated samples with the same statistical characteristics as the genuine article--are growing more and more common in the data-hungry world of machine learning. These fakes can be used to train AIs in areas where real data is scarce or too sensitive to use, as in the case of medical records or personal financial data. The idea of synthetic data isn't new: driverless cars have been trained on virtual streets.