Developing synthetic individual-level population datasets: The case of contextualizing maps of privacy-preserving census data

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a synthetic population dataset that is open and realistic and can be used to facilitate understanding the cartographic process and contextualizing the cartographic artifacts. We first discuss an optimization model that is designed to construct the synthetic population by minimizing the difference between the summarized information of the synthetic populations and the statistics published in census data tables. We then illustrate how the synthetic population dataset can be used to contextualize maps made using privacy-preserving census data. Two counties in Ohio are used as case studies.