Faking It to Make It: When Synthetic Data Actually Works
The latest tutorial by Li, Huang, Li, Zhou, Zhang, and Liu surveys how GANs, diffusion models, and LLMs now mass‑produce synthetic text, tables, graphs, time series, and images for data‑mining workloads. That’s the supply side. The demand side—execs asking “will this improve my model and keep us compliant?”—is where most projects stall. This piece extracts a decision framework from the tutorial and extends it with business‑grade evaluation and governance so you can decide when synthetic data is a shortcut—and when it’s a trap. ...