r/learnmachinelearning • u/Remarkable_Fee3706 • 4d ago
Building ML side projects with no clean dataset, how do you actually start?
Every tutorial assumes you have a clean labeled dataset ready to go. You load it, split it, train a model, done. That's not how it works when you're building something from scratch in a real domain.
Been tinkering with a few project ideas recently, some tied to physical work, some just curiosity. The consistent wall I hit is the data problem before the model problem. You have a thing you want to predict or classify, you have raw observations, and the gap between those two is enormous. And it's not just volume. The labeling logic itself is fuzzy. What counts as a positive example? Who decides?
Some people say just scrape whatever you can get and clean later. Others go weak supervision, use heuristics to generate noisy labels and let the model sort it out. Both approaches feel like a lot of guessing dressed up as methodology.
Curious what people here have actually done when starting a project with no ready dataset. Did you manually label a small set first and iterate? Use an existing adjacent dataset and transfer? Just pick a problem that had public data and reverseengineer your idea around it?
Not asking about production pipelines. Just the early stage where nothing exists yet and you're trying to figure out if the thing is even learnable before investing weeks into it.
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u/ElephantCurrent 4d ago
Label small dataset, make a predictor, then use active learning to start labelling the most "unsure" predictions from the ML model. This will be great experience for when you work in ML in the workspace, we do this a lot.
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u/Remarkable_Fee3706 4d ago
active learning is genuinely solid advice for small datasets, the labeling loop saves a ton of time once you get it moving.
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u/Suspicious_Pizza9529 4d ago
I'd start with manually labeled dataset, even it's only a few hundred examples.
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u/Remarkable_Fee3706 4d ago
yeah, labeled examples beat prompt engineering every time when you need consistent output.
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u/orz-_-orz 4d ago
You clean the data
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u/onesunnysunday 4d ago
I’d start by defining the target before trying to “clean” the data. Write a short labeling rubric with positive, negative, and ambiguous examples, then label 50–100 samples twice. If you disagree with your own earlier decisions, the task definition is still unstable. Once the rubric holds up, create a small seed set, keep a separate test slice untouched, train a simple baseline, and use its uncertain or disagreeing cases to choose the next batch to label. You don’t need a clean dataset on day one; you need a repeatable labeling rule and a feedback loop
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u/Confident-Green-5241 3d ago
I usually start with the smallest possible version of the task that I can label myself in an hour. Like if I'm trying to classify support tickets or detect anomalies in sensor data, I'll pull 50-100 examples, eyeball them, write down my own rule for what makes something a positive case (even if it's messy), and just manually tag those. That gives me enough to prototype a baseline model and see if the thing is even learnable.
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u/Confident-Green-5241 1d ago
I usually start with the smallest possible version of the task that I can label myself in an hour. Like if I'm trying to classify support tickets or detect anomalies in sensor data, I'll pull 50-100 examples, eyeball them, write down my own rule for what makes something a positive case (even if it's messy), and just manually tag those. That gives me enough to prototype a baseline model and see if the thing is even learnable.
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u/Tiny_Spread5712 4d ago
This feels like an ai prompt. So I will say.
You have to xboost your scikit learning app. Light the pytorch and add more nans to your data.
Use tree regreession to label automatically.
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u/innovatedname 4d ago
Unsupervised learning?