Abstract: We compare a sample-free method proposed by Gargiulo et al. (2010) and a sample-based method proposed by Ye et al. (2009) for generating a synthetic population, organised in households, from various statistics. We generate a reference population for a French region including 1310 municipalities and measure how both methods approximate it from a set of statistics dervied from this reference population. We also perform sensitivity analysis. The sample-free method better fits the reference distributions of both individuals and households. It is al...
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