Glossary entry

Synthetic data

Artificially generated examples used for training or evaluation.

Definition

What it means

Synthetic data is produced by models, simulations, procedural systems, or rules rather than collected directly from naturally occurring human activity.

Why it matters

Role in the system

It can extend scarce datasets and target unusual cases, but quality and diversity must be checked carefully.

Example

In practice

A simulator generates many variations of a warehouse task for a robotics agent.