Generating a Synthetic Population of Individuals in Households: Sample-Free Vs Sample-Based Methods

We compare a sample-free method proposed by Gargiulo et al. (2010) and a sample-based method proposed by Ye et al. (2009) for generating a synthetic population, organised in households, from various statistics. We generate a reference population for a French region including 1310 municipalities and measure how both methods approximate it from a set of statistics dervied from this reference population. We also perform sensitivity analysis. The sample-free method better fits the reference distributions of both individuals and households. It is also less data demanding but it requires more pre-processing. The quality of the results for the sample-based method is highly dependent on the quality of the initial sample.

[1]  Johan Barthelemy,et al.  Synthetic Population Generation Without a Sample , 2013, Transp. Sci..

[2]  Chandra R. Bhat,et al.  Population Synthesis for Microsimulating Travel Behavior , 2007 .

[3]  Alison J. Heppenstall,et al.  Creating Realistic Synthetic Populations at Varying Spatial Scales: A Comparative Critique of Population Synthesis Techniques , 2012, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[4]  A. G. Wilson,et al.  A new representation of the urban system for modelling and for the study of micro-level interdependence , 1976 .

[5]  W. Deming,et al.  On a Least Squares Adjustment of a Sampled Frequency Table When the Expected Marginal Totals are Known , 1940 .

[6]  David Voas,et al.  Evaluating Goodness-of-Fit Measures for Synthetic Microdata , 2001 .

[7]  Zengyi Huang.  A COMPARISON OF SYNTHETIC RECONSTRUCTION AND COMBINATORIAL OPTIMISATION APPROACHES TO THE CREATION OF SMALL-AREA MICRODATA , 2002 .

[8]  P. Waddell,et al.  Methodology to Match Distributions of Both Household and Person Attributes in Generation of Synthetic Populations , 2009 .

[9]  Guillaume Deffuant,et al.  An Iterative Approach for Generating Statistically Realistic Populations of Households , 2010, PloS one.

[10]  Paul Williamson,et al.  An evaluation of the combinatorial optimisation approach to the creation of synthetic microdata , 2000 .

[11]  Ta Theo Arentze,et al.  Creating Synthetic Household Populations , 2007 .

[12]  M. D. McKay,et al.  Creating synthetic baseline populations , 1996 .