Essay

Analyze the consequences of mixing greenhouse and orchard photos before creating the dev and test sets.

Question: Suppose a plant-disease team has 155,000 labeled images: 150,000 from a greenhouse camera system and 5,000 from farmers' phone uploads. If all 155,000 images are randomly shuffled before splitting into train, dev, and test sets, what problems would this create for evaluation? Why does that split strategy conflict with the goal of choosing dev and test data?

Sample answer: Random shuffling would make the dev and test sets come from the same overall mixture as the training set, but that mixture is dominated by greenhouse images. Since 150,000 of 155,000 images are greenhouse photos, about 96.8% of the dev and test examples would also be greenhouse images. That means the evaluation sets would mainly measure performance on greenhouse conditions, even if the real deployment target is farmers' phone photos. The team could end up optimizing decisions for the easier or more common source instead of the data it actually needs to handle in production.

Key points:

  • Random shuffling forces train, dev, and test to reflect the same blended distribution.
  • With 150,000 of 155,000 images coming from the greenhouse source, dev and test would be about 96.8% greenhouse images.
  • The resulting evaluation would not match the target distribution of farmer-uploaded photos.
  • This breaks the rule that dev and test sets should reflect the data the system must perform well on in the future.

Rubric: The answer must explain that random shuffling makes dev and test sets dominated by greenhouse images (about 96.8%), that this does not match the intended phone-photo distribution, and that this mismatch violates the principle that evaluation data should resemble future deployment data.

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Updated 2026-08-12

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