A Deep Generative Framework for Joint Households and Individuals Population Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep generative VAE-based framework for creating realistic, geographically accurate synthetic populations that preserve complex sociodemographic relationships and align with census data.

Contribution

It presents a novel data structure, transfer learning process, and loss function to generate synthetic populations with preserved correlations and geographic distribution.

Findings

Successfully generated realistic household and individual records in Delaware.

Accurately matched census tract population statistics.

Demonstrated transferability in North Carolina.

Abstract

Household and individual-level sociodemographic data are essential for understanding human-infrastructure interaction and policymaking. However, the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) offers only a sample at the state level, while census tract data only provides the marginal distributions of variables without correlations. Therefore, we need an accurate synthetic population dataset that maintains consistent variable correlations observed in microdata, preserves household-individual and individual-individual relationships, adheres to state-level statistics, and accurately represents the geographic distribution of the population. We propose a deep generative framework leveraging the variational autoencoder (VAE) to generate a synthetic population with the aforementioned features. The methodological contributions include (1) a new data structure for capturing household-individual and individual-individual relationships, (2) a transfer learning process with pre-training and fine-tuning steps to generate households and individuals whose aggregated distributions align with the census tract marginal distribution, and (3) decoupled binary cross-entropy (D-BCE) loss function enabling distribution shift and out-of-sample records generation. Model results for an application in Delaware, USA demonstrate the ability to ensure the realism of generated household-individual records and accurately describe population statistics at the census tract level compared to existing methods. Furthermore, testing in North Carolina, USA yielded promising results, supporting the transferability of our method.