We present a data-driven method for synthesizing 3D indoor scenes by inserting objects progressively into an initial, possibly, empty scene. Instead of relying on few hundreds of hand-crafted 3D scenes, we take advantage of existing large-scale annotated RGB-D datasets, in particular, the SUN RGB-D database consisting of 10,000+ depth images of real scenes, to form the prior knowledge for our synthesis task. Our object insertion scheme follows a co-occurrence model and an arrangement model, both learned from the SUN dataset. The former elects a highly probable combination of object categories along with the number of instances per category while a plausible placement is defined by the latter model. Compared to previous works on probabilistic learning for object placement, we make two contributions. First, we learn various classes of higher-order object-object relations including symmetry, distinct orientation, and proximity from the database. These relations effectively enable considering objects in semantically formed groups rather than by individuals. Second, while our algorithm inserts objects one at a time, it attains holistic plausibility of the whole current scene while offering controllability through progressive synthesis. We conducted several user studies to compare our scene synthesis performance to results obtained by manual synthesis, state-of-the-art object placement schemes, and variations of parameter settings for the arrangement model.