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.
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.