RESEARCH
Papers from the Synonym team on agent-based simulation, synthetic consumer behavior, and validation methodology.
Benchmarking Synthetic Consumer Agent Behavior Against Real-World Survey Baselines
Andrew Somers, Jaysen Kang — Synonym | March 2026
This article proposes a framework to validate synthetic consumer agent behavior in an agent-based simulation. A set of 5,000 demographically representative synthetic agent personas was created across various cities in the United States, with initial focus on the city of Austin, Texas. Using Jensen-Shannon Divergence as the key benchmark, synthetic agent response distributions are found to be similar to real-world baseline data at 91%, with 91% mean similarity and a variance ratio of 0.73.
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