Synthetic data

Reality is overrated: Steve Cassidy finds out how computer- generated data can be more useful than the genuine stuff

- By Steve Cassidy

Synthetic data? What's that?

At the simplest level, synthetic data is the 21st-century equivalent of the “lorem ipsum” placeholder text used in the print industry – a lot of nonsense words with the appearance of real language, which are used to show how the final page will look. Synthetic data brings this idea into the modern world of computing: it’s any set of made-up words, numbers or bits that’s designed to be fed into a spreadsheet, an algorithm or some other process in place of real data.

Why is that useful? Isn't it better to work with real-world data?