How to Do Machine Learning with Small Data? -- A Review from an
  Industrial Perspective
Ivan Kraljevski Yong Chul Ju Dmitrij Ivanov Constanze Tschöpe Matthias Wolff
Artificial intelligence experienced a technological breakthrough in science,
industry, and everyday life in the recent few decades. The advancements can be
credited to the ever-increasing availability and miniaturization of
computational resources that resulted in exponential data growth. However,
because of the insufficient amount of data in some cases, employing machine
learning in solving complex tasks is not straightforward or even possible. As a
result, machine learning with small data experiences rising importance in data
science and application in several fields. The authors focus on interpreting
the general term of "small data" and their engineering and industrial
application role. They give a brief overview of the most important industrial
applications of machine learning and small data. Small data is defined in terms
of various characteristics compared to big data, and a machine learning
formalism was introduced. Five critical challenges of machine learning with
small data in industrial applications are presented: unlabeled data, imbalanced
data, missing data, insufficient data, and rare events. Based on those
definitions, an overview of the considerations in domain representation and
data acquisition is given along with a taxonomy of machine learning approaches
in the context of small data.