What is Impostor.jl?

Impostor is a synthetic tabular-data generator based on random samplings over pre-defined values. One of the main features of Impostor is its ability to generate data making sense of relations between columns.

Avaliable Providers

• Identity
• Finance
• Localization

Getting Started

First of all, let's make sure that the Impostor package is installed in your current environment:

using Pkg; Pkg.add("Impostor")

Generator Functions

To get started with Impostor, select your generator function of choice, the simplest example is to generate single and multiple values specifying the number of expected values in the output.

julia> firstname(5)5-element Vector{String}:
 "Tonya"
 "Daryl"
 "Alison"
 "Leon"
 "Wyatt"
julia> firstname()  # equivalent to firstname(1)"Maurice"

Generator functions may be found in each of the Providers individual pages or via the API Reference page.

All generator functions accept a locale keyword argument, in case no value is provided in the locale kwarg the Session Locale is used (see section Concepts below).

julia> firstname(2; locale = ["pt_BR"])2-element Vector{String}:
 "Alícia"
 "Lara"
julia> firstname(2; locale = ["en_US", "pt_BR"])2-element Vector{String}:
 "Ana Clara"
 "Kathryn"

In order to change the default locale used by the session use the setlocale! function:

julia> setlocale!("pt_BR");
julia> firstname(2)2-element Vector{String}:
 "Natália"
 "Ana Laura"

Impostor Templates

Besides providing several generator functions which may be used as standalone data series generators, Impostor also exports the ImpostorTemplate which is a utility struct to encapsulate formats and generate a fully fledgned table.

julia> template = ImpostorTemplate([:firstname, :surname, :country_code, :state, :city]);
julia> template(3)Dict{Any, Any} with 5 entries:
  :country_code => Union{Missing, String3}[String3("USA"), String3("USA"), Stri…
  :state        => Union{Missing, String31}[String31("North Carolina"), String3…
  :firstname    => ["Brandon", "Jamie", "Adam"]
  :surname      => ["Aguirre", "Lin", "Faulkner"]
  :city         => String31["Charlotte", "Wilmington", "Curitiba"]
julia> template(5, DataFrame; locale = ["pt_BR", "en_US"]) # optionally provide a `sink` type5×5 DataFrame
 Row │ firstname  surname    country_code  state         city
     │ String     String     String3       String31      String31
─────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │ Reginald   Norton     USA           Indiana       Indianapolis
   2 │ Tracy      Flowers    BRA           Minas Gerais  Betim
   3 │ Alejandra  Moyer      USA           Oregon        Portland
   4 │ Rebekah    Santos     USA           Connecticut   Hartford
   5 │ Manuela    Mcpherson  USA           New Jersey    Trenton

Concepts

In order to facilitate naming and referencing later on the major concepts implemented are described below:

• Generator Functions: are the users' main point of interaction when generating data, every function exported by Impostor which produces data is a generator function.

• Providers: are the broader domain in which the contents and generator functions are organized. For example some of the available providers in Impostor are Finance, Identity and Localization.

• Contents: correspond to the specific intermediate kinds of data available for generator-functions to manipulate. For example, within the Localization provider, some of the available contents are street_format, street_prefix and street_suffix which are combined by the generator-functions like address and street to produce entries returned to the user.

• Locales determine the locale domain from which the each content is sampled in its respective generator function. For example, generating data with firstname(5; locale=["pt_BR"]) will generate the content "firstname" from the provider "Identity" corresponding to names typical to the brazillian portuguese language.

• Session Locale: corresponds to the default locale used by the generator functions when no locale is explicitly provided as a kwarg. The session locale can be set at any time with the setlocale! function, taking on also multiple values for the session locale, e.g. setlocale!(["pt_BR", "en_US"]).

julia> firstname(3)  # value-based generation3-element Vector{String}:
 "Laura"
 "Glenda"
 "Lawrence"
julia> firstname(["F"], 3)  # option-based generation3-element Vector{String}:
 "Evelyn"
 "Nichole"
 "Kimberly"
julia> firstname(["F", "M", "F"])  # mask-based generation3-element Vector{String}:
 "Rose"
 "Vernon"
 "Lindsey"

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, both in implementation, documentation and data addition to the static files. Don't hesitate to reach out and request features, file issues or make any suggestions.

For the specific cases of contributing with code and/or data addition, we strongly suggest that you skim through the Quick Tour page in the Developer Guide section in order to get familiar with the structure and overall design of the package.

Roadmap

Future developments in Impostor will target the addition of different providers such as:

• Business
  • Business name
  • Business field
• Technology
  • IPV4/6
  • MAC address
  • File extension
  • File name
  • Vendor
  • Device
• Contact
  • E-mail
  • Username
  • Phone number
  • Social media
• Color
  • RGB Color
  • Hex-Color