Press "Enter" to skip to content

Generating Fake Data with R

Dave Mason takes a look at generating fake PII in R:

I’ve been thinking about R and how it can be used by developers, DBAs, and other SQL Server professionals that aren’t data scientists per se. A recent article about generating a data set of fake transactional data got me thinking about this again and I wondered, can R be used to obfuscate PII data?

In a word, yes. Well, mostly. (More on this in a bit.) As with anything R-related, there are probably multiple packages that are useful for any given task. For this one, I’ll focus on the “generator” package.

Click through to see what it does and Dave’s thoughts on the topic. It would also be possible to generate fake data in R by hitting a web API like Daniel Hutmacher’s service.