[HN Gopher] Generate Synthetic Data in 3 Lines of Code
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       Generate Synthetic Data in 3 Lines of Code
        
       Author : mmegger
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2022-09-07 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (gretel.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (gretel.ai)
        
       | johnwatson11218 wrote:
       | Does anyone know if there are deep learning libraries that can
       | model the relations between table based data? I see many that
       | work on a table or a data frame but where I work our db is over
       | 1000 tables and nobody can understand it. I feel like the next
       | frontier is a tool that you point to your oracle or sql server
       | and it compresses the table space. Whether you consider it a kind
       | of PCA dimensionality reduction or the logical extension of the
       | db "normal" forms ... it is just compression.
        
         | andrewnc wrote:
         | We have some preliminary work in this direction
         | https://github.com/gretelai/multi-table
         | 
         | I love the idea of "table space" though. It would be fun to
         | traverse this space and output a new database at each step,
         | like a VAE.
        
         | rockemsockem wrote:
         | I believe that random forests are still the primary way data
         | scientists work with tabular data. Deep learning hasn't cracked
         | tabular data like it has other areas.
        
           | johnwatson11218 wrote:
           | Everytime I look into this stuff it is just one
           | table/dataframe. Nobody is modelling the relations between
           | things. I think there is a huge opportunity for a product
           | that can look at Customer, Items, Orders, Returns,
           | Payment_Methods etc. and first of all show me when things
           | tend to co-occur, so that it could generate synthetic
           | customers that have the statistically correct number of
           | registered payment methods where those payment details are
           | also synthetically generated.
           | 
           | Next would be the ability to decompose or factor my entire db
           | into the subcomponents and make suggestions for combining
           | tables. The use case would be a legacy enterprise system that
           | has grown so complex and tangled that devs are afraid to do
           | basic db refactoring. From where I'm sitting and working this
           | is the next gold rush, apply DL methods to the bread and
           | butter computing, log flow analysis, etc.
        
         | cush wrote:
         | There's a company called Tonic.ai that reminded me of your
         | comment - they deeply analyze a db, including the data, and are
         | able to find and strip out all of the PII, while keeping the
         | various relationships in tact. Super interesting podcast on it
         | here: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2021/09/29/faking-
         | data-...
         | 
         | They mention in the podcast that most customers end up finding
         | relationships in their tables that they didn't know they had -
         | that weren't explicitly in schema
        
           | chiarabeth wrote:
           | Thanks for the shoutout, cush! And yup, our platform Tonic
           | enables developers to realistically de-identify their data
           | while preserving relationships and consistency across tables
           | within their DBs, to optimize dev and test with real fake
           | data. You can sign up for a sandbox here:
           | https://www.tonic.ai/
           | 
           | We've also recently released a new platform called Djinn that
           | is specifically designed for data science workflows. It
           | enables you to query from tables across your DB to build
           | customized views of only the data you need and synthesize
           | high-fidelity data based on models trained on those views.
           | Relationships are fully preserved and no external scripting
           | is required. You can create an account and take it for a spin
           | here: https://djinn.tonic.ai/?signup
           | 
           | Full disclosure, I'm Chiara Colombi, Product Marketing
           | Manager at Tonic.ai. Cheers!
        
       | andrewnc wrote:
       | We've been working hard to make it super simple to get started
       | with useful synthetic data.
       | 
       | If you want to know how you would go and use this for your own
       | problems check out some of our other posts
       | 
       | https://gretel.ai/blog/how-to-safely-work-with-another-compa...
        
         | niviksha wrote:
         | My use case is generating a very high rate (10k e/s up to 100k
         | e/s) of JSON-NL events from samples of JSON-encoded log data
         | (JSON-NL to be exact). Is this supported in OSS Gretel?
         | 
         | FYI, I'd built a hand-crafted generator using JSONNet templates
         | and Golang, but I really wanted something that could model
         | source data distributions accurately. The use case is large-
         | scale load testing of customer workloads without requiring
         | actual data.
        
           | andrewnc wrote:
           | We're currently beta testing something that fits this use
           | case directly. The models we have today are really great at
           | capturing the original distribution, but they're not always
           | the fastest. This new stuff will change that, feel free to
           | reach out (maybe on our slack?) and we can see if we can get
           | something working
        
             | andrewnc wrote:
             | Blog post is out now https://gretel.ai/blog/introducing-
             | gretel-amplify
             | 
             | They get 43,300 records per second on this example, which
             | seems to the right order of magnitude for you
        
       | jmole wrote:
       | ...and you too can learn the biases and weights matrix of our
       | synthetic data generator!
        
         | BobbyJo wrote:
         | Models are trained on input data to generate synthetics data
         | similar to the input. It's not so much 'a' synthetic data
         | generator. It's more like a platform for creating your own
         | synthetic data generators using your own data and ML.
        
       | niviksha wrote:
       | Wow, this is great. I built my own synthetic time series data
       | generator for benchmarking, could have saved myself a bunch of
       | trouble with this.
        
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