A demographic microsimulation model with an integrated household alignment method

Abstract

Many dynamic microsimulation models have shown their ability to reasonably project detailed population and households using non-data based household formation and dissolution rules. Although, those rules allow modellers to simplify changes in the household construction, they typically fall short in replicating household projections or if applied retrospectively the observed household numbers. Consequently, such models with biased estimation for household size and other household related attributes lose their usefulness in applications that are sensitive to household size, such as in travel demand and housing demand modelling. Nonetheless, these demographic microsimulation models with their associated shortcomings have been commonly used to assess various planning policies which can result in misleading judgements. In this paper, we contribute to the literature of population microsimulation by introducing a fully integrated system of models for different life event where a household alignment method adjusts household size distribution to closely align with any given target distribution. Furthermore, some demographic events that are generally difficult to model, such as incorporating immigrant families into a population, can be included. We illustrated an example of the household alignment method and put it to test in a dynamic microsimulation model that we developed using dymiumCore, a general-purpose microsimulation toolkit in R, to show potential improvements and weaknesses of the method. The implementation of this model has been made publicly available on GitHub, a code sharing platform.