Had a developer tell me my AI training data was 'too clean' and it threw me off

I was showing him my model at a meetup in Austin and he said real world data has way more noise, so I've probably been over filtering my datasets. Anyone else run into this where your curated data actually makes things worse in production?

3 comments

3 Comments

fisher.thomas1d ago

Yeah, the "too clean" thing used to bug me too. I was all about scrubbing every weird edge case until I put a model into production and it just fell apart on messy real inputs. I started leaving in like 5-10% of what I'd normally filter out, stuff like typos and sensor glitches, and it actually made the thing way more robust. It's kind of humbling realizing my perfectionism was just making it fragile.

williamhenderson6h agoMost Upvoted

That builds on something I read from a Google research team last year. They found that training on slightly messy data actually helps the model learn to handle noise better, like how we learn to read handwriting after seeing enough bad scrawl. It fights the whole instinct to polish everything, but the data argues for leaving the grime in there.

quinn1611d ago

Figured out my model hates perfection almost as much as my ex.