Implementation of socio-demographic attributes into SPENSER, a synthetic population tool

A synthetic population is the representation of actual or future population when data about every individual is not available. It contains each individual’s characteristics (e.g., age, sex) that are obtained from census and survey datasets. Currently, some tools allow generating synthetic populations for research in diverse fields but the number of attributes given is scarce. In this paper, we present an extension of the SPENSER tool that provides an increase number of attributes for each individual. Attributes such as marital status, children dependency, driving licence ownership, economic activity and occupation are obtained based on Census, UK Government and ONS datasets.