Synthetic Population for Minnesota, US (ver. 2.4.0)

The synthetic population for the state of Minnesota is constructed to be statistically indistinguishable from the real population at the spatial resolution of a US block group as measured by the US Census on selected demographic variables, which in this case are age (AGEP), household income (HINCP), household size (NP), race (RAC1P) and hispanic (HISP). The population includes people and households with demographic characteristics along with residential locations and general activity locations at parcel-level resolution and accuracy. All individuals are assigned activity sequences and activity locations through statistical matching methods. Finally, a contact network is constructed. The precise way in which this is done depends on the intended scenario. Here the target application is epidemic spread of influenza-like diseases, and the construction of the network is done at each location through a modified Erdos-Renyi random graph.