Case context: A team building a mobile app to identify flower species has 8,000 photos taken by users on phones. They add 25,000 flower images collected from gardening websites to the training set.

Question: Using the idea of shared patterns between data sources, explain why the extra website images are likely to improve performance on the phone photos.

Sample answer: The website images provide many additional examples of flowers, so the model sees more variation in petals, colors, and shapes. Because the website photos and the phone photos still show the same kinds of flowers, the model can transfer what it learns from the larger website collection to the smaller phone-photo set. That extra coverage usually helps the classifier make better predictions on user photos.

Key points:

• The larger dataset gives the model more flower examples.
• The two sources are similar enough for knowledge to transfer.
• The added data should improve classification on phone photos.

Rubric: Full credit for explaining both that the model gets more examples of flowers and that the website and phone photo distributions overlap enough for the learned features to help on user photos.