An Analytical Approach to Generate Synthetic Population by Harnessing Household Travel Survey Data with Mobile Phone Data

Abstract:

Conventional methods to synthesize population use household travel survey (HTS) data. HTS encounters a low spatial heterogeneity issue due to a low sampling rate of the HTS data. Passively collected mobility (PCM) data (e.g., cellular traces) provides extensive spatial coverage but poses integration challenges with HTS data due to differences in spatial resolution and attributes. This study introduces a novel cluster-based data fusion method to address these limitations and simultaneously generate synthetic populations with accurate sociodemographics and homework locations at high spatial heterogeneity. Analytical properties are derived to retain essential distributional characteristics from both datasets in the fused distribution. The data fusion properties are validated using HTS and LTE/5G cellular signaling data from Seoul, South Korea. Validation against census data confirms the method's efficacy in maintaining distributional consistency while increasing spatial heterogeneity, with 97% of the generated population being unobserved in the HTS data. This research advances methods to synthesize a population by leveraging the complementary strengths of HTS and PCM data, providing a robust framework for generating spatially diverse synthetic populations essential for urban planning.

Bio:

Dr Prateek Bansal is a Presidential Young (Assistant) Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Before joining NUS in 2022, he was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Imperial College London and did a Ph.D. from Cornell, an MSc from UT Austin, a BTech from IIT Delhi. Prateek leads the Behavioural Cognitive Science Lab at NUS and is a co-principal investigator of the Adaptive Mobility module at Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore. His research group is interested in creating new methods to address challenging questions related to mobility behavior and the adoption of emerging technologies at an individual level and an urban scale. His research has led to over 55 journal articles. Apart from top Transportation journals, he regularly publishes in interdisciplinary journals like Energy Economics and Statistics and Computing. He also serves as the editorial board member of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, and Journal of Choice Modelling, among others. He is a member of the TRB’s standing committees on Travel Survey Methods (AEP25) and Travel Forecasting (AEP50), and a regular board member of the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR).