Data Curation: The Stepping Stone For Building Efficient Machine Learning Models

Machine learning models thrive on data, but data has inherent complexities that can only be resolved through the deployment of efficient data curation practices.

Data’s importance in artificial intelligence (AI) is similar to the role of blood in the human body. Data is the fuel that empowers AI models to learn, grow, and adapt to make decisions. In the absence of quality and specialized training data, AI models are nothing but hollow shells incapable of delivering valuable results.

Large quantities of data are created daily, and the number is only growing. A large proportion of this data is unstructured, unorganized, and inaccurate. To tap into its potential, this data needs to be processed and managed.

Data curation is the need of the hour, as it helps link disparate data sources and make them easily accessible. It is undeniably the foundation or stepping stone for building machine learning models.

So, let’s explore the various nuances of data curation and understand how it makes machine-learning models efficient.

Data Curation: Meaning

Data curation is identifying, organizing, annotating, enhancing, and maintaining data. It helps create qualitative datasets required for efficient training, testing, and validating machine learning models.

Data curation aims to make it easy to find, understand, and access datasets since the datasets have to be large, diverse, and annotated to make the machine-learning process productive and the models efficient.

Data curation can also be described as a metadata management exercise. Data catalogs are crucial in metadata management as they allow metadata to be easily accessed and informative for non-technical data consumers.

Data Curation: Significance in Machine Learning

Machine learning models thrive on quality and relevant data, which can only be achieved through data curation. Data curation helps create accurate and dependable machine-learning models by reducing the time and computational resources required to train them.

Proper data cleansing and preparation through data curation ensures that the machine learning models perform efficiently. Data curation helps tie disparate data sources so that they can be readily accessed and used. This helps safeguard against data overload and ensures that the data remains a valuable asset rather than a potential liability.

Data curation allows real-time data quality monitoring to enhance the AI model’s prediction accuracy. It also improves the machine learning model’s capability to generalize and make accurate predictions.

Data curation can be compared to an investment that pays off through the efficient performance of machine learning models.

Data Curation: Six Key Stages

Data curation has six key stages. It starts with data collection and continues through preprocessing, cleaning, and enhancement.

Please refer to the description of each of these stages outlined below.

Stage 1. Collection of Data

This initial stage involves collecting data (structured and unstructured) from various sources, which include databases, websites, IoT devices, social media, and others.

Stage 2. Cleaning of Data

Once collected, data has to be cleaned. The cleaning process involves eliminating duplicates, handling outliers, rectifying inconsistencies, and dealing with missing values. Cleaning helps maintain the data’s quality and accuracy so that it’s ready for further steps.

Stage 3. Annotation of Data

The data is annotated according to the machine-learning task. For image recognition, the images will need to be labeled, and for natural language processing, texts will need to be annotated to reflect parts of speech or sentiment.

Stage 4. Transformation of Data

Data transformation involves transforming the cleaned and annotated data into a format suitable for machine learning algorithms. This may involve one-hot encoding in the case of categorical data, normalization in the case of numerical data, or conversion of text to numbers.

Stage 5. Integration of Data

If data is collected from multiple sources, it must be integrated consistently and meaningfully. This involves aligning data based on timestamps or merging datasets based on shared identifiers.

Stage 6. Maintenance of Data

Dataset maintenance ensures data stays relevant and valuable in machine learning tasks. Data curation aims to ensure that the data used in machine learning tasks is accurate, consistent, and qualitative.

Data Curation: Benefits & Challenges in Machine Learning

Data curation encompasses all the processes required to prepare data for analysis and preservation. It also covers manual and automated methods for handling tasks such as indexing, cleaning, and normalizing data to ensure quality, add metadata, and comply with standards. However, data curation is also fraught with specific challenges.

Given below are some of the key benefits and challenges of data curation.

Benefits	Challenges
Better Quality of Data: Data curation enhances the data quality used for training AI models, resulting in accurate and reliable models.	Data quality: Stringent data verification and validation protocols are required to maintain machine learning models’ integrity.
Limits Training Time: Data cleaning and preparation limits the time needed to train models and enhance the efficiency of the process.	Data diversity: To ensure the data is representative and free of biases, the dataset must consider various scenarios to mirror the diverse and multifaceted nature of real-world conditions, which takes much work.
Resource optimization: Data curation makes the process cost-efficient by optimizing computational resources needed for training the models.	Annotation and labeling: These are generally manual tasks that require a reasonable amount of time, resources, and expertise.
Enhanced model performance: Data curation enhances the performance and efficiency of machine learning models.	Data privacy and ethical considerations: Data curators must be vigilant about data protection regulations and ethical guidelines to ensure data curation complies with privacy and moral norms.

 

Data Curation: Five Key Aspects

Data curation is ever-evolving to cope with the data’s growing volume and complexity. The five key trends in data curation are given below:

1. Automation in Data Management:

AI and machine learning are increasingly being used to automatically classify, tag, and assess data quality. These technologies supersede human capabilities in speed and accuracy, enabling data experts to concentrate on more complicated tasks.

2. Concentrate on data lineage and explainability:

Data lineage helps track data origin and transformation, and explainability helps ensure that users understand how data models arrive at conclusions.

3. Collaborative process:

Launching new tools and platforms makes data curation a collaborative exercise. It ensures that data scientists, domain experts, and other stakeholders can work together to ensure the data is accurate, relevant, and usable.

4. Integrating with Cloud-based platforms:

Cloud computing ensures data is easily stored, managed, and curated. It offers various features, like data lakes, pipelines, and governance tools, that help streamline the data curation process.

5. Role of Data Curator:

The data curator’s role is evolving and focussed on data governance, strategy, and communication. They are also responsible for ensuring data quality and compliance with regulations.

In Summary

Data curation is a continuing process, and organizations should deploy robust data curation techniques throughout the model-building process. Companies gravitating towards AI to resolve business problems through complex data has only reinforced the growing need for data curation.

Quality training data is the backbone of machine learning algorithms. Data curation ensures machine learning models perform efficiently through accurate, relevant, and unbiased data. Incorporating data curation practices helps ensure that machine learning projects can achieve quality outcomes and deliver more value.

Author Bio

 

 

 

Matthew Mcmullen is the SVP of Cogito Tech (16 Horseshoe Ln, Levittown, NY 11756) an AI training data company offering human-in-the-loop workforce solutions for AI and ML companies.