how does synthetic data function?
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Probably many examples but I can give you two easy ones.
1) Testing a computer algorithm. Let’s say I’m testing a website for a store and I want to make sure the website functions properly. I can create two sets of “synthetic data”, meaning not real data generated from users. The first set of synthetic data are the potential purchases a person could make. It’s testing the intelligence of my store’s “shopping cart” software to make sure a person isn’t charged for buying 0 of something, to make sure a person can’t buy “infinite” items or buy products we don’t offer or are out of stock. The second set of synthetic data might be a million random credit card numbers for payment. This could be used to test the payment side of the software for errors, that it doesn’t accept fake credit card numbers, that it maybe scans the number from a list of fraudulent databases, or that it doesn’t try and process a payment with human error, like the user forget all the digits of the card, or used an expired card, etc.
So in example 1 synthetic data would just be a data base used to test a buhzillion possible sales and check for errors or loop holes in the code of the “real” software.
2) Simulations. For example something like Minecraft “builds a world” custom for each game. It uses computer code to random construct the data that make up your world, where trees are, where the monsters are, where the mountains are, etc. All that “simulation data” is an example of “synthetic data”, meaning it’s data generated purely by a computer program without trying to replicate an actual word fed to it scanners or something like that.
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