Seven Frequent Causes of Knowledge Leakage in Machine Studying | by Yu Dong | Sep, 2024

Key Steps in knowledge preprocessing, function engineering, and train-test splitting to forestall knowledge leakage

After I was evaluating AI instruments like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for machine studying use instances in my final article, I encountered a important pitfall: knowledge leakage in machine studying. These AI fashions created new options utilizing the complete dataset earlier than splitting it into coaching and take a look at units — a standard trigger of information leakage. Nonetheless, this isn’t simply an AI mistake; people typically make it too.

Knowledge leakage in machine studying occurs when info from outdoors the coaching dataset seeps into the model-building course of. This results in inflated efficiency metrics and fashions that fail to generalize to unseen knowledge. On this article, I’ll stroll via seven frequent causes of information leakage, so that you just don’t make the identical errors as AI 🙂

Picture by DALL·E

To raised clarify knowledge leakage, let’s take into account a hypothetical machine studying use case:

Think about you’re a knowledge scientist at a significant bank card firm like American Categorical. Every day, thousands and thousands of transactions are processed, and inevitably, a few of them are fraudulent. Your job is to construct a mannequin that may detect fraud in real-time…