Synthetic Population Catalyst

Introduction

The Synthetic Population Catalyst (SPC) makes it easier for researchers to work with synthetic population data in Great Britain. It combines a variety of data sources and outputs a single file in protocol buffer format, describing the population and its activities in a given study area. The data include socio-demographic, health, salary and daily activity data per person, and information about the venues where people conduct those activities.

SPC outputs can be used to catalyse other projects. Rather than join together many raw data sources yourself and deal with missing and messy data, you can leverage SPC’s effort and well-documented schema.

A formal paper to describe SPC has been published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.

You can download this site as a PDF and find all code on Github.

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This work was supported by Wave 1 of The UKRI Strategic Priorities Fund under the EPSRC Grant EP/W006022/1, particularly the “Ecosystem of Digital Twins” and “Shocks and Resilience” themes within that grant & The Alan Turing Institute