An iterative approach for generating statistically realistic populations of households

Background: Many different simulation frameworks, in different topics, need to treat realistic datasets to initialize and calibrate the system. A precise reproduction of initial states is extremely important to obtain reliable forecast from the model. Methodology/Principal Findings: This paper proposes an algorithm to create an artificial population where individuals are described by their age, and are gathered in households respecting a variety of statistical constraints (distribution of household types, sizes, age of household head, difference of age between partners and among parents and children). Such a population is often the initial state of microsimulation or (agent) individual-based models. To get a realistic distribution of households is often very important, because this distribution has an impact on the demographic evolution. Usual techniques from microsimulation approach cross different sources of aggregated data for generating individuals. In our case the number of combinations of different households (types, sizes, age of participants) makes it computationally difficult to use directly such methods. Hence we developed a specific algorithm to make the problem more easily tractable. Conclusions/Significance: We generate the populations of two pilot municipalities in Auvergne region (France), to illustrate the approach. The generated populations show a good agreement with the available statistical datasets (not used for the generation) and are obtained in a reasonable computational time.Comment: 16 oages, 11 figure

A new information system for tracing geolocations of bovine cattle

National audienceThe present paper describes the main idea of a new information system architecture dedicated to the animal geolocation acquisitions. It is applied to traceability of beefs in Brazil. In case of sanitary alerts, the system should be able to determine the animals which have been in contact with a diseased animal. This proposal is issued from studies undertaken in the project OTAG supported by the European Union. OTAG focuses on improving methods and geotechnologies for recording reliable and accurate data on beef production. OTAG develops an operational geo-decisional system to track and trace the mobility, provenance, and state of beef cattle. The presented method enables the acquisition of animal geolocations at a large scale. It minimizes the quantity of devices equipped on animals, and consequently the global economical and energetic costs of the system

Flux diagram describing the algorithm for the generation of an artificial population for PRIMA project.

<p>Flux diagram describing the algorithm for the generation of an artificial population for PRIMA project.</p

Histogram of the number of households according to the age ranges of person living alone in Abrest and Bellerive-sur-Allier.

<p>Source: INSEE, French Census data, 1990.</p

Distribution of households according to the number of children for the municipalities Abrest and Bellerive sur Allier.

<p>Source: INSEE, French Census data, 1990.</p

Distribution of live births by birth order and mother's age range in France.

<p>Source: Eurostat Data 1999.</p

Histogram of the number of couples according to their difference of ages in France in 1999.

<p>Source: INSEE, “Enquête sur l'étude de l'histoire familiale de 1999”.</p

Histograms for age of head distribution for the municipality of Abrest (left plot) and of Bellerive-sur-Allier (right plot).

<p>The light purple bars represents the real data, the dark purple bars the average for 100 realizations for the artificial population. The error is the standard deviation on the 100 replicas.</p

Histogram of the number of individuals according to various age ranges of 5 years each for Abrest and Bellerive-sur-Allier.

<p>Source: INSEE, French Census data, 1990.</p

Distribution of households according to the type in France.

<p>Source: INSEE, 1990.</p