What is synthetic data?

A field guide to the various species of fake data: Part 1

Synthetic data is data that you’re planning to treat as if it came from the place/group you wish it came from. (It didn’t.)

Synthetic data is, to put it bluntly, fake data. As in, data that’s not actually from the population you’re interested in. (Population is a technical term in data science, which I explain here in blog form and here in video form.)