IT & Computers

Preprocessing data before training a generative AI model is crucial to ensure that the model learns effectively and produces high-quality results. Here are some common data preprocessing techniques used:

1. Data Cleaning:
   • Handling Missing Values: Fill in, interpolate, or remove missing values from the dataset.
   • Removing Duplicates: Identify and remove duplicate entries to avoid redundancy.
   • Noise Reduction: Filter out irrelevant or erroneous data that could affect the training process.
2. Normalization and Scaling:
   • Normalization: Adjust data to a common scale, typically [0, 1] or [-1, 1], to ensure that features contribute equally to the model.
   • Standardization: Transform data to have zero mean and unit variance, often used for data with Gaussian distribution.
3. Data Augmentation:
   • For Images: Techniques like rotation, flipping, scaling, and cropping to create variations of existing images and increase dataset size.
   • For Text: Synonym replacement, paraphrasing, and back-translation to enrich the text data.
4. Feature Extraction and Selection:
   • Dimensionality Reduction: Techniques like Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) to reduce the number of features while retaining essential information.
   • Feature Engineering: Creating new features from raw data that could help the model learn better patterns.
5. Tokenization and Vectorization (for Text Data):
   • Tokenization: Splitting text into tokens, such as words or subwords.
   • Embedding: Converting tokens into numerical vectors using methods like Word2Vec, GloVe, or transformers-based embeddings (e.g., BERT).
6. Data Balancing:
   • Handling Imbalanced Datasets: Techniques like oversampling the minority class, undersampling the majority class, or using synthetic data generation methods (e.g., SMOTE) to balance class distributions.
7. Data Transformation:
   • Log Transformation: Applying a logarithmic function to skewed data to reduce the impact of extreme values.
   • Fourier or Wavelet Transforms: For converting time-series or spatial data into frequency domains to capture different features.
8. Text Preprocessing (for NLP tasks):
   • Lowercasing: Converting all text to lowercase to maintain consistency.
   • Removing Stop Words: Eliminating common words that may not contribute significant meaning.
   • Stemming or Lemmatization: Reducing words to their root forms to standardize variations.