Synthetic data is quickly becoming a critical tool for organizations to unlock the value of sensitive customer data while keeping the privacy of their customers protected and in compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. It can be generated quickly in abundance and has been proven to drastically improve machine learning performance. As a result, it is often used for advanced analytics and AI training, such as predictive algorithms, fraud detection and pricing models.
According to Gartner, by 2024, 60% of the data used for the deÂvelÂopÂment of AI and anÂaÂlytÂics projects will be synÂthetÂiÂcally genÂerÂated.
MOSTLY AI pioneered the creation of synthetic data for AI model development and software testing. With things moving so quickly in this space here are four trends that we see happening in AI and synthetic data in 2022:
Most of the machine learning and AI algorithms currently in production, interacting with customers, making decisions about people have never been audited for fairness and discrimination, the training data has never been augmented to fix embedded biases. It is only through massive scandals that companies are finding out and learning the hard way that they need to pay more attention to biased data and to use fair synthetic data instead.
Regulations all over the world are getting stricter every day; many countries have a personal data protection policy in place by now. Using customer data is getting increasingly difficult for a number of other reasons too - people are more privacy-conscious and are increasingly likely to refuse consent to using their data for analytics purposes. So companies literally run out of relevant and usable data assets. Companies will learn to understand that synthetic data is the way out of this dilemma.
Synthetic data is better than real when it comes to AI training. And it can be shared freely across teams and organizations. AI and machine learning algorithms simply perform better when trained with upsampled, augmented and bias-corrected synthetic data, being able to pick up on patterns more efficiently without overfitting.
Not all synthetic data is created equal. To start off with, there is a world of difference between what we call structured and unstructured synthetic data. Unstructured data means images and text for example, while structured data is mainly tabular in nature. There are lots of open source and proprietary synthetic data providers out there for both kinds of synthetic data and the quality of their generators varies widely. It’s high time to establish a synthetic data standard to make sure that synthetic data users get consistently high-quality synthetic data. We are already working on structured synthetic data standards.
If you’d like to connect on these trends, we’re happy to set up an interview or write a byline on these topics for your publication. Please let us know - thanks.