What is data augmentation?

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Machine learning models can perform wonderful things--if they have enough training data. Unfortunately, for many applications, access to quality data remains a barrier. One solution to this problem is "data augmentation," a technique that generates new training examples from existing ones. Data augmentation is a low-cost and effective method to improve the performance and accuracy of machine learning models in data-constrained environments.