Answers.Body: <p>You should <strong>not</strong> use augmented data in the validation nor in the test set.</p>
  <p>Validation and test set are purely used for hyperparameter tuning and estimating the final performance, i.e. estimating the generalization error. These two data sets should be as close as possible to other data, which you could have acquired, but you actually haven not, i.e. your true data distribution.</p>
  <p>It's fine to augment training data, since it mimics other samples from the true distribution by applying transformations, noise, etc. and thus helps to increase generalization performance (assuming your augmentation assumptions are right). But evaluation should always be performed on original data.</p>
  
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Answers.CreationDate: 2020-07-11T13:22:40.320Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2020-07-11T13:22:40.320Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Tinu
Body: <p>I am trying to predict nursing activity using mobile accelerometer data. My dataset is a CSV file containing x, y, z component of acceleration. Each frame contains 20-second data. The dataset is highly imbalance, so I perform data augmentation and balance the data. In the data augmentation technique, I only use scaling and my assumption is, if I scale down or up a signal the activity remains the same. Using this assumption I augmented the data and my validation set not only contain the original signals but also the augmented (scaling) signals. Using this process, I am getting quite a good accuracy that I never being expected using only data augmentation. So, I am thinking that I performed a terrible mistake somewhere. I check the code, everything is right. So now I think, since my validation set has augmented data, that's the reason of getting this high accuracy (maybe the augmented data is really easy to classify).</p>
  
Tags: <machine-learning><deep-learning><computer-vision>
Title: Can I use augmented data in the validation set?
UserDisplayName: Swakshar Deb
ThreadText: # Can I use augmented data in the validation set?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2020-07-11)
  
  I am trying to predict nursing activity using mobile accelerometer data. My dataset is a CSV file containing x, y, z component of acceleration. Each frame contains 20-second data. The dataset is highly imbalance, so I perform data augmentation and balance the data. In the data augmentation technique, I only use scaling and my assumption is, if I scale down or up a signal the activity remains the same. Using this assumption I augmented the data and my validation set not only contain the original signals but also the augmented (scaling) signals. Using this process, I am getting quite a good accuracy that I never being expected using only data augmentation. So, I am thinking that I performed a terrible mistake somewhere. I check the code, everything is right. So now I think, since my validation set has augmented data, that's the reason of getting this high accuracy (maybe the augmented data is really easy to classify).
  
  **Tags:** machine-learning, deep-learning, computer-vision
  
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  ## 1 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_1 on 2020-07-11. Score: 2
  
  You should **not** use augmented data in the validation nor in the test set.
  
  Validation and test set are purely used for hyperparameter tuning and estimating the final performance, i.e. estimating the generalization error. These two data sets should be as close as possible to other data, which you could have acquired, but you actually haven not, i.e. your true data distribution.
  
  It's fine to augment training data, since it mimics other samples from the true distribution by applying transformations, noise, etc. and thus helps to increase generalization performance (assuming your augmentation assumptions are right). But evaluation should always be performed on original data.
  
  
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