synthpop: Bespoke Creation of Synthetic Data in R

Abstract

In many contexts, confidentiality constraints severely restrict access to unique and valuable microdata. Synthetic data which mimic the original observed data and preserve the relationships between variables but do not contain any disclosive records are one possible solution to this problem. The synthpop package for R, introduced in this paper, provides routines to generate synthetic versions of original data sets. We describe the methodology and its consequences for the data characteristics. We illustrate the package features using a survey data example.