Introduction to synthetic data

This free online workshop about synthetic data has three parts:

• A presentation to introduce the fundamentals of synthetic data, including what synthetic data is and is not, what are the most important concepts related to synthetic data, ways synthetic data can be used and ways synthetic data can be generated.
• A live coding demonstration in Jupyter notebook to demonstrate several methods in Python for generating synthetic data of various forms.
• A Q&A session to offer participants the opportunity to engage directly with the content and ask questions related to the presentation or live coding demonstration.

Additional resources: Participants will have access to all workshop materials, including slide decks and Jupyter notebooks, via a GitHub repository. The 2026 folder contains the slide deck for the session and the .ipynb file to be used within the code demo.

Prerequisites: No formal prerequisites are required to attend. However, those who wish to actively participate in the coding demonstration should have:

• access to a computer with Python installed, or an online Python environment
• basic Python knowledge (e.g., loading packages, handling data, etc.)

Presenter: Jools Kasmire, UK Data Service
Jools is a Senior Research Fellow and Computational Social Science Training Leader for the UK Data Service Training and User Support team. Their training themes include data mining, text-mining, machine learning, synthetic data, reproducibility, writing code, programming languages, data management, data visualization, web-scraping, API’s, agent-based models, natural language processing, and social network analysis. They have an undergraduate degree in linguistics, MSc in evolution of language and cognition, PhD in evolution of socio-technical networks, and has spent 10 years with the University of Manchester on computational methods for social science research. Jools enjoys showing people methods that allow them to create new research questions or to think about established research questions in new ways.

This event will be livestreamed on our UK Data Service YouTube channel but the chat will be disabled. By registering and attending the Zoom event you will be able to ask questions and interact.

Recordings of UK Data Service events are made available on our YouTube channel and, together with the slides, on our past events pages soon after the event has taken place.