Training from Zero: Radio Frequency Machine Learning Data Quantity Forecasting

The data used during training in any given application space is directly tied to the performance of the system once deployed. While there are many other factors that go into producing high performance models within machine learning, there is no doubt that the data used to train a system provides the foundation from which to build. One of the underlying rule of thumb heuristics used within the machine learning space is that more data leads to better models, but there is no easy answer for the question, "How much data is needed?" This work examines a modulation classification problem in the Radio Frequency domain space, attempting to answer the question of how much training data is required to achieve a desired level of performance, but the procedure readily applies to classification problems across modalities. The ultimate goal is determining an approach that requires the least amount of data collection to better inform a more thorough collection effort to achieve the desired performance metric. While this approach will require an initial dataset that is germane to the problem space to act as a textittarget dataset on which metrics are extracted, the goal is to allow for the initial data to be orders of magnitude smaller than what is required for delivering a system that achieves the desired performance. An additional benefit of the techniques presented here is that the quality of different datasets can be numerically evaluated and tied together with the quantity of data, and ultimately, the performance of the architecture in the problem domain.