[Term of the Day]: Synthetic Data

Term of the Day

“Synthetic Data”

Definition — What is Synthetic Data?

Synthetic data is information that's programmatically generated rather than data created naturally in the real world. Synthetic data is created without actual driving organic data events.

For example, while a real set of identifiers is collected about a customer who uses a platform, an engineer could ultimately just create the same identifiers for a fictional customer, and load them into the system – and that would be an example of synthetic data.

It's used by financial institutions to test and train their fraud detection systems on certain situations or criteria, by researchers working on clinical trials to create baselines for future studies, and increasingly to train machine learning models, as Waymo did by testing its autonomous vehicles on simulated roadways.