Forensic analysis using synthetic datasets

Abstract

A system, method, and computer-readable medium for generating synthetic data are described. Improved data models for databases may be achieved by improving the quality of synthetic data upon for modeling those databases and for checking the authenticity of existing numerical data. According to some aspects, these and other benefits may be achieved by using numeric distribution information in a schema describing one or more numeric fields and, based on that schema, distribution-appropriate numerical data may be generated. Also, another schema may be used to generate a second set of numerical data having a different distribution that is not expected for the one or more numeric fields. Actual data may be compared against the generated datasets. When the actual data is determined to be statistically similar to the second numerical dataset, an alert may be generated. A benefit includes finding potentially fraudulent datasets using an efficient approach.