GenSynthPop: Generating a Spatially Explicit Synthetic Population of Agents and Households from Aggregated Data

Abstract

Synthetic populations are microscopic representations of actual citizens living in a specific area. They play an increasingly important role in studying and modeling citizens and are often used to build agent-based social simulations.Traditional approaches for synthesizing populations use a detailed sample of the population (which may not be available) or combine data into a single joint distribution, and draw agents or households from these. In this paper, we propose a sample-free approach where synthetic individuals and households directly represent the estimated joint distribution to which attributes are iteratively added, conditioned on previous attributes such that the relative frequencies within each joint group of attributes are maintained.