Quick Question: Fabricated or Synthetic Data?
March 24, 2022
I read “Evidence of Fabricated Data in a Vitamin C trial by Paul E Marik et al in CHEST.” Non-reproducibility appears to be a function of modern statistical methods. Okay. The angle in this article is:
… within about 5 minutes of reading the study it became overwhelmingly clear that it is indeed research fraud and the data is (sic) fabricated.
Synthetic data are fabricated. Some big outfits are into using machine generated data sort of related to real life data to save money.
Here’s my question:
What’s the difference between fabricated data and synthetic data?
I am leaning to “not much.” One might argues that the motives in a research paper is tenure. In other applications, maybe the goal is just efficiency and its close friend money. My larger concern is that embedding fabricated and / or synthetic data into applications may lead to some unexpected consequences. Hey, how about that targeting of a kinetic? Screwy ad targeting is one thing, but less benign situations can be easily conceptualized; for example, “We’re sorry. That smart car self driving module did not detect your mom in the crosswalk.”
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2022
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