Vodafone Group partners with Hazy to roll out synthetic data
LONDON, 14 Dec 2022 – Leading global synthetic data firm, Hazy, announced today that it has been successfully collaborating with Vodafone to test the use of synthetic data.
Synthetic data created with Artificial Intelligence (AI) from actual datasets helps companies in executing data science projects through the ability to easily share datasets across countries and teams. It supports corporate data governance, adherence to privacy regulation and quality outcomes in machine learning.
The concept allows companies to digitally generate the data that they need, on demand. The size of the data set and the specifications can be tailored to the use case. This can dramatically increase the speed at which Big Data projects can be completed.
The initial project was carried out as a Proof of Concept (PoC) with Vodafone Group R&D and Vodafone UK and focussed on synthetic data for training and testing machine learning models for customer value management.
Currently these machine learning models are trained using large amounts of customer data, which can be a slow process. The desire is to dramatically increase agility for data science projects, while adhering to regulatory data protection requirements, thereby increasing the quality of models, reducing time to production and maximising impact of Big Data projects.
The Vodafone Group R&D team used both internal metrics and the Hazy software built-in metrics to evaluate the generated synthetic data. They concluded that the synthetic dataset preserved the performance of the machine learning model, saving the team time, cost and in some cases even increasing the model performance.
The PoC went live in 8 weeks, during which the Hazy team worked alongside Vodafone’s innovation team to enable them to generate synthetic data themselves. The complete training phase of the data generator took 1 minute, compared to potentially waiting several weeks to get access to production data or create a test dataset manually.
Thanks to the success of this PoC, Vodafone Group is considering the best ways to potentially adopt synthetic data capabilities. This will be accompanied by gathering and prioritising future use cases which could benefit from a flexible capability to produce various types of synthetic data.
“We are really excited about the potential of Hazy Synthetic Data. Our team was impressed with the quality, utility and usability of the generated datasets, as well as the software’s ease of deployment. We are keen to explore the power of a synthetic data platform for Vodafone teams to access useful synthetic data. This software could be a powerful, cross-function tool, saving time, increasing productivity of data science teams, accelerating project deliveries, and enabling us to operate more efficiently.”
Luke Ibbetson, Head of R&D at Vodafone
“We are delighted with the success of this Proof of Concept and excited about the potential of synthetic data for Vodafone. Thanks to the close working relationship developed with the Vodafone team and a great choice of data set for customer value management, we were able to rapidly develop a synthetic version that met the success criteria for privacy, speed and fidelity. We are looking forward to building on this success to operationalise the value of synthetic data across the group.”
Harry Keen, CEO at Hazy
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