The Syntho Engine also captures deeper, ‘hidden’ relations, other than multivariate correlations and bivariate distributions. We evaluate these by a build in mechanism in our Syntho Engine that evaluates the accuracy of a machine learning model that is trained to distinguish between real and synthetic data. Experiments show that even machine learning models can barely distinguish original data from synthetic data. These outcomes are not only one of the interesting elements in our quality report, these are also the key performance measure that Syntho uses for optimization of the Syntho Engine.

As all deep ‘hidden’ relations of the data are retained within synthetic data, it can be used as a full replacement for the original data in machine learnings tasks. As an example we will use the Census dataset again, let’s say you want to predict the income of an individual given its other characteristic. Now if we test the accuracy on a separately hold test set for two machine learning models, one trained on the original data and the other trained on the synthetic data, an accuracy loss of less of than 2% is observed. This shows that synthetic data retains statistical properties to such an extent that, even in machine learning tasks, it provides a viable alternative for real data.