Generating a Spatially Explicit Synthetic Population of Individuals and Households

Table of Contents

1. Description
2. Usage
3. Project Structure
4. Data
5. Evaluation Plots
6. Contributors
7. License

Description

Repository for the generation of a synthetic population for the district of Den Haag Zuid-West in the year 2019. This project was undertaken at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, during 2022-2023 by Marco Pellegrino and a team of contributors.

The code in this repository utilizes the R library GenSynthPop created by Tabea Sonnenschein.

The work has been presented at the C-MAS workshop conference in London, 2023.

Usage

The repository provides the following functionalities:

1. Data Preparation

Scripts in /src/format-datasets are used to convert the input CBS demographic information into more convenient data frames, which are stored in the /data/processed folder.

2. Generating a Synthetic Population

The script generate_synthetic_population.R generates a synthetic population of individuals with demographic attributes, including:

• Gender: male, female
• Age: integer value
• Migration background: Dutch, Western, and non-Western
• Current education level: nothing/low/middle/high
• Education attainment: nothing/low/middle/high (Note: Dutch education level based on CBS classification)
• Children individuals living with at least one parent: true/false
• Car license ownership: true/false

3. Generating Households

The script generate_households.R groups agents of the synthetic population into households and generates the following household-level attributes:

• Standardized 10% income group
• Car ownership

Project Structure

• Root folder: Contains the main scripts to generate the synthetic population and group them into households.
• /src: Contains helper functions and utility scripts.
  • /format-datasets: Contains scripts to convert the raw datasets into processed datasets ready for use.
• /data:
  • /raw: CBS datasets to be processed by the scripts in /src
  • /processed: Data sets ready-to-use, outputs of the scripts in /src/format-datasets
• /evaluation: Contains scripts to aggregate data for plots and tools to plot different distributions and comparisons.

Contributors

This project was made possible thanks to the hard work and contributions from:

• Marco Pellegrino (Author)
• Jan de Mooij
• Tabea Sonnenschein
• Mehdi Dastani
• Dick Ettema
• Brian Logan
• Judith A. Verstegen

License

This repository is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). For more details, see the LICENSE file.