Synthetic population housing and person records for the United States

Constructs a population that is meant to be representative of the 2012 US population using Census ACS 5-year PUMS.

• Author: William Sexton

Modification Log:

• William Sexton - Created, March 2017
• Simson Garfinkel - Added automation, July 2017

Project Design

Inputs

The synthetic population was generated from the 2010-2014 ACS PUMS housing and person files, released in 2015.

Citation:

United States Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census. (2017-03-06).
American Community Survey 2010-2014 ACS 5-Year PUMS File [Data set].
Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social
Research [distributor]. http://doi.org/10.3886/E100486V1

Direct Download: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/pums/2015/5-Year

However, the data that we have was built from copies of the data obtained from ICPSR/OpenICPSR

• Persistent URL: http://doi.org/10.3886/E100486V1

• See also Data Lumos: http://doi.org/10.3886/E100521V1

• https://www.openicpsr.org/datalumos/project/100521/version/V1/view;jsessionid=E4FA2D6C9A6003487790F2127C15B3DB

Reference for this work:

Synthetic population housing and person records for the United States Principal Investigator(s): William Sexton, Cornell University; John M. Abowd, Cornell University; Ian M. Schmutte, University of Georgia; Lars Vilhuber, Cornell University Version: V1

• https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/100274/version/V1/view?path=/openicpsr/100274/fcr:versions/V1/data

Outputs

There are 17 housing files

• repHus0.csv, repHus1.csv, ... repHus16.csv and 32 person files
• rep_recode_ACSpus0.csv, rep_recode_ACSpus1.csv, ... rep_recode_ACSpus31.csv.

Files are split to be roughly equal in size. The files contain data for the entire country. Files are not split along any demographic characteristic. The person files and housing files must be concatenated to form a complete person file and a complete housing file, respectively.

If desired, person and housing records should be merged on 'id'. Variable description is below.

See README2.md for data dictionary and information on additional variables.

Project Status:

Testing

Stress testing to determine whether these data can actually reproduce accurate statistics for 2012 is still underway.

Acknowledgements

Funding support

This work is supported under Grant G-2015-13903 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on "The Economics of Socially-Efficient Privacy and Confidentiality Management for Statistical Agencies" (PI: John M. Abowd)