What Is Synthetic Data? The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

03/01/2023
by   Emiliano De Cristofaro, et al.
0

Sharing data can often enable compelling applications and analytics. However, more often than not, valuable datasets contain information of sensitive nature, and thus sharing them can endanger the privacy of users and organizations. A possible alternative gaining momentum in the research community is to share synthetic data instead. The idea is to release artificially generated datasets that resemble the actual data – more precisely, having similar statistical properties. So how do you generate synthetic data? What is that useful for? What are the benefits and the risks? What are the open research questions that remain unanswered? In this article, we provide a gentle introduction to synthetic data and discuss its use cases, the privacy challenges that are still unaddressed, and its inherent limitations as an effective privacy-enhancing technology.

READ FULL TEXT

page 2

page 3

research
08/31/2023

The Use of Synthetic Data to Train AI Models: Opportunities and Risks for Sustainable Development

In the current data driven era, synthetic data, artificially generated d...
research
10/24/2017

Synthetic Data for Social Good

Data for good implies unfettered access to data. But data owners must be...
research
11/21/2022

A Framework for Auditable Synthetic Data Generation

Synthetic data has gained significant momentum thanks to sophisticated m...
research
04/04/2023

30 Years of Synthetic Data

The idea to generate synthetic data as a tool for broadening access to s...
research
12/05/2022

Towards a Taxonomy for the Use of Synthetic Data in Advanced Analytics

The proliferation of deep learning techniques led to a wide range of adv...
research
05/06/2022

Synthetic Data – what, why and how?

This explainer document aims to provide an overview of the current state...
research
06/20/2023

Diverse Community Data for Benchmarking Data Privacy Algorithms

The Diverse Communities Data Excerpts are the core of a National Institu...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset