Question 245 - MLS-C01 discussion

Data augmentation is a technique to increase the size and diversity of the training data by applying random transformations such as rotation, translation, scaling, flipping, etc. This can help reduce overfitting and improve the generalization of the model.Data augmentation can be done using the Amazon SageMaker image classification algorithm, which supports various augmentation options such as horizontal_flip, vertical_flip, rotate, brightness, contrast, etc1

The Amazon SageMaker k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm is a supervised learning algorithm that can be used to label unlabeled data based on the similarity to the labeled data. The k-NN algorithm assigns a label to an unlabeled instance by finding the k closest labeled instances in the feature space and taking a majority vote among their labels. This can help increase the size and diversity of the training data and reduce overfitting.The k-NN algorithm can be used with the Amazon SageMaker image classification algorithm by extracting features from the images using a pre-trained model and then applying the k-NN algorithm on the feature vectors2

Using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to label the unlabeled images is not a good option because it is a manual and costly process that requires human annotators. Moreover, it does not address the issue of overfitting on the existing labeled data.

Using image preprocessing to transform the images into grayscale images is not a good option because it reduces the amount of information and variation in the images, which can degrade the performance of the model. Moreover, it does not address the issue of overfitting on the existing labeled data.

Replacing the activation of the last layer with a sigmoid is not a good option because it is not suitable for a multi-class classification problem. A sigmoid activation function outputs a value between 0 and 1, which can be interpreted as a probability of belonging to a single class. However, for a multi-class classification problem, the output should be a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1, which can be achieved by using a softmax activation function.

References:

1:Image classification algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

2:k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm - Amazon SageMaker