Case Study

Whether to Add Contract Scans to a Plant Photo Classifier

Case context: You are training a classifier that recognizes common garden plants from smartphone photos. Your dev and test sets contain ordinary outdoor pictures of plants, leaves, and flowers. A vendor offers you a very large collection of scanned legal contracts, which contain only typed text and no plant images.

Question: Using the relevant machine learning guidance, decide whether the contract scans should be added to the training set, and explain what happens to training cost and model capacity if they are included.

Sample answer: The contract scans should be excluded from training. They are far outside the target data distribution and do not provide useful signal for identifying plants. If they were included, training would take more computation and the model would spend some of its capacity learning patterns that are irrelevant to the plant classification task.

Key points:

  • Exclude the contract scans from training.
  • They are unlike the dev/test examples and add little or no value.
  • Including them increases training cost and uses model capacity on irrelevant features.

Rubric: The student should state that the scans should be excluded. They must explain that including them wastes computation and model capacity on features that do not help the target classification task.

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Updated 2026-08-12

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