Chapter 2 Prerequisites

This book details synthetic population generation, or ‘synthpop’ generation, provides detailed methods to create your own synthpop using a combination of publicly available datasets. The code for reproducing these methods is provided in the github repository here: https://github.com/Flannery-BIng/synth_pop

What is a synthetic population? The following demonstrates what a synthetic population would look like for a sample of one Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA # 00503).

This map is created using a random sampling of 25% of each respective census tract’s synthetic population generated in order to make it easier to view. The number of dots therefore represents the population density in that tract.

We can compare this population to the census tract level statistics provided by ACS. Let’s take a look at the Guatemalan population by tract, for example. We see a similar concentration in the southern tracts of the PUMA.