Building and testing machine learning models requires access to large and diverse data. But where can you find usable datasets without running into privacy issues? This practical book introduces techniques for generating synthetic data-fake data generated from real data-so you can perform secondary analysis to do research, understand customer behaviors, develop new products, or generate new revenue Data scientists will learn how synthetic data generation provides a way to make such data broadly available for secondary purposes while addressing many privacy concerns. Analysts will learn the principles and steps for generating synthetic data from real datasets. And business leaders will see how synthetic data can help accelerate time to a product or solution. This book describes: Steps for generating synthetic data using multivariate normal distributions Methods for distribution fitting covering different goodness-of-fit metrics How to replicate the simple structure of original data An approach for modeling data structure to consider complex relationships Multiple approaches and metrics you can use to assess data utility How analysis performed on real data can be replicated with synthetic data Privacy implications of synthetic data and methods to assess identity disclosure

About the Author
Dr. Khaled El Emam is a senior scientist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) Research Institute and Director of the multi-disciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory. Lucy Mosquera has a bachelor's degree in Biology and Mathematics from Queen's University and is a current graduate student in the department of statistics at the University of British Columbia. During her time at Queen's, Lucy provided data management support on a dozen clinical trials and observational studies run through Kingston General Hospital's Clinical Evaluation Research Unit. Lucy has also worked on clinical trial data sharing methods based on homomorphic encryption and secret sharing protocols. At Replica Analytics, Lucy is responsible for developing statistical and machine learning models for data generation, and integrating subject area expertise in clinical trial data into synthetic data generation methods, as well as the statistical assessments of our synthetic data generation. Dr. Richard Hoptroff is a long term technology inventor, investor and entrepreneur.


Book Information
ISBN 9781492072744
Author Khaled El Emam
Format Paperback
Page Count 175
Imprint O'Reilly Media
Publisher O'Reilly Media