Boosting Data Analytics With Synthetic Volume Expansion

Synthetic data generation, a cornerstone of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), signifies a paradigm shift in data science by addressing data scarcity and privacy while enabling unprecedented performance. As synthetic data gains prominence, questions arise concerning the accuracy of statistical methods when applied to synthetic data compared to raw data. This article introduces the Synthetic Data Generation for Analytics (Syn) framework. This framework employs statistical methods on high-fidelity synthetic data generated by advanced models such as tabular diffusion and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models. These models, trained on raw data, are further enhanced with insights from pertinent studies through knowledge transfer. A significant discovery within this framework is the generational effect: the error of a statistical method on synthetic data initially diminishes with additional synthetic data but may eventually increase or plateau. This phenomenon, rooted in the complexities of replicating raw data distributions, highlights a "reflection point" - an optimal threshold in the size of synthetic data determined by specific error metrics. Through three case studies - sentiment analysis of texts, predictive modeling of structured data, and inference in tabular data - we demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework over traditional ones. We underline its potential to amplify various statistical methods, including gradient boosting for prediction and hypothesis testing, thereby underscoring the transformative potential of synthetic data generation in data science.