pulse synth from-profile

Audience: CLI users generating a synthetic .pulse cohort whose distributions match a real cohort — typically to share a sanitised replica without exposing the underlying rows.

pulse synth from-profile reads a profile JSON captured by pulse profile create and writes a synthetic .pulse file whose per-field distributions and (optional) pairwise correlations follow the profile. The profile retains no individual rows from the source; only summary statistics.

LLM agents using MCP: see the pulse_synth_from_profile MCP tool and the synthetic-data skill.

Synopsis

pulse synth from-profile --profile FILE --output FILE --rows N
                         [--seed N] [--json]

Flags

Flag	Alias	Type	Default	Purpose
`--profile`	`-p`	string	(required)	Profile JSON path
`--output`	`-o`	string	(required)	Output `.pulse` file path
`--rows`		int	(required)	Rows to generate
`--seed`		int	0	Deterministic RNG seed
`--json`		bool	false	Emit the standard envelope

--rows is required (unlike from-schema, which can pull it from the spec) because the profile does not carry a generation count of its own.

Determinism

Same (profile, seed, rows) triple → byte-identical output. Seeds are int64; default 0.

Profile shape

The profile is a synth.Profile JSON object produced by pulse profile create. It carries per-field type, descriptive statistics, top-K categorical entries (default K = 32), optional pairwise correlations (when --include-correlations was passed at profile-creation time), and a row count.

See pulse profile create for how to capture one, and synth/ for the underlying Go types.

Output

Text mode

Generated 1000 rows -> sales.synth.pulse (rejected 0)

`--json`

Same envelope shape as synth from-schema.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	Profile parse error, infeasible constraints, or output write failure

Examples

# Capture once
pulse profile create --input sales.pulse --output sales.profile.json

# Re-generate any number of times with different seeds
pulse synth from-profile --profile sales.profile.json --output sales.s42.pulse --rows 10000 --seed 42
pulse synth from-profile --profile sales.profile.json --output sales.s43.pulse --rows 10000 --seed 43

Limitations

Categorical tails: anything past the captured top-K is replaced with a sentinel “other” bucket sized to its observed weight.
Correlations: pairwise only, and only between numeric fields. The profile capture flag --include-correlations opts in; without it, fields are generated independently.
Decimal and geo fields: regenerated within the same type family but with synthetic value distributions; downstream uses that depend on exact field values (e.g. joinable identifiers) need the schema-driven path instead.

pulse profile create
pulse synth from-schema
skills/synthetic-data.md — the spec / profile grammar

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