Synthetic population

From HandWiki

Synthetic population is artificial population data that fits the distribution of people and their relevant characteristics living in a specified area as according to the demographics from census data.[1] Synthetic populations are often a basis for microsimulation or also agent based models of population behavior.[2] The latter can be used for simulation of disease transmission,[3] traffic[4] and similar.

Synthetic population are initial sets of agents with detailed demographic and socioeconomic attributes, which allow execution of agent-based microsimulation.[5] Due to privacy reasons and data limitations and restrict observability of entire real population. Therefore, the population synthesis procedure is applied, which expands a small data sample of population by using auxiliary data, to generate a synthetic population as close as possible to the real population in its characteristics.

Examples of application

Chicago Social Interaction Model or chiSIM is an agent-based simulation of individuals and locations in Chicago along with their daily behavior. The population is modeled as a set of heterogeneous, interacting, adaptive agents. These agents are the population of all the residents of Chicago.[6]

In 2023, World Data Lab created a synthetic population for New York using microdata and summary statistics.[7] It was use to calculate the poverty levels among the neighborhoods for targeted social programs.

References

  1. Huynh, N; Namazi-Rad, Mohammad-Reza; Perez, P.; Berryman, M.; Chen, Q.; Barthelemy, J. (1 January 2013). "Generating a synthetic population in support of agent-based modeling of transportation in Sydney". Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A: 1357–1363. https://ro.uow.edu.au/eispapers/1737/. 
  2. Hörl, Sebastian; Balac, Milos (2021). "Synthetic population and travel demand for Paris and Île-de-France based on open and publicly available data" (in en). Transportation Research Part C 130: 103291. doi:10.1016/j.trc.2021.103291. https://hal.science/hal-03286361/. 
  3. Xu, Zhujing; Glass, Kathryn; Lau, Colleen L.; Geard, Nicholas; Graves, Patricia; Clements, Archie (2017). "A synthetic population for modelling the dynamics of infectious disease transmission in American Samoa" (in en). Scientific Reports 7 (1): 16725. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-17093-8. ISSN 2045-2322. PMID 29196679. PMC 5711879. Bibcode2017NatSR...716725X. https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/51831/. 
  4. Mueller, Kirill; Axhausen, Kay W. (September 2011). "Hierarchical IPF: Generating a synthetic population for Switzerland". ERSA Conference Papers. https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa11p305.html. 
  5. Zhu, Yi; Ferreira, Joseph (January 2014). "Synthetic Population Generation at Disaggregated Spatial Scales for Land Use and Transportation Microsimulation". Transportation Research Record 2429 (1): 168–177. doi:10.3141/2429-18. 
  6. Macal, Charles M.; Collier, Nicholson T.; Ozik, Jonathan; Tatara, Eric R.; Murphy, John T. (December 2018). "Chisim: An Agent-Based Simulation Model of Social Interactions in a Large Urban Area". 2018 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). pp. 810–820. doi:10.1109/WSC.2018.8632409. ISBN 978-1-5386-6572-5. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8632409. 
  7. "Fighting poverty with synthetic data". Brookings. 2023. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fighting-poverty-with-synthetic-data/.