title: Copula-Based Approach to Synthetic Population Generation.
abstract: Generating synthetic baseline populations is a fundamental step of agent-based modeling and simulation, which is growing fast in a wide range of socio-economic areas including transportation planning research. Traditionally, in many commercial and non-commercial microsimulation systems, the iterative proportional fitting (IPF) procedure has been used for creating the joint distribution of individuals when combining a reference joint distribution with target marginal distributions. Although IPF is simple, computationally efficient, and rigorously founded, it is unclear whether IPF well preserves the dependence structure of the reference joint table sufficiently when fitting it to target margins. In this paper, a novel method is proposed based on the copula concept in order to provide an alternative approach to the problem that IPF resolves. The dependency characteristic measures were computed and the results from the proposed method and IPF were compared. In most test cases, the proposed method outperformed IPF in preserving the dependence structure of the reference joint distribution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejeon, South Korea.
authors.forename: Byungduk
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jeong
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejeon, South Korea.
authors.forename: Wonjoon
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea.
authors.forename: Deok-Soo
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejeon, South Korea.
authors.forename: Hayong
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5161-661X
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shin
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D008962:Models, Theoretical