Case Study

Check a split strategy for a plant-disease app trained on mixed-source photos.

Case context: You are developing a phone app that identifies crop diseases. Your dataset has 90,000 lab-collected reference photos and 10,000 photos taken by farmers in real fields. A teammate proposes combining all 100,000 images and then drawing train, dev, and test splits at random so each split has the same overall mix.

Question: What is wrong with this splitting plan? Describe what the dev/test sets will mostly contain, and explain how that choice changes what the team ends up optimizing for.

Sample answer: The problem is that a random split of the combined pool will leave the dev and test sets dominated by the lab-reference images, at roughly 90% of each split. That does not match the real operating setting, where the app must perform well on farmer photos from field conditions. As a result, model tuning will be guided by performance on the easier lab distribution instead of the target field distribution.

Key points:

  • Random splitting makes the dev/test sets about 90% lab photos.
  • Lab-reference photos are not the same as the real target distribution.
  • The team will tune the model for the wrong data source instead of the field images the app must handle.

Rubric: The response must state that the dev/test sets do not represent the target field-photo distribution, identify that approximately 90% of dev/test images will come from the lab source, and explain that model improvement will be directed toward the wrong distribution.

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Updated 2026-08-12

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