Point process models for household distributions within small areal units

Abstract

Spatio-demographic data sets are increasingly available worldwide, permitting ever more realistic modeling and analysis of social processes ranging from mobility to disease trans- mission. The information provided by these data sets is typically aggregated by areal unit, for reasons of both privacy and administrative cost. Unfortunately, such aggregation does not permit fine-grained assessment of geography at the level of individual households. In this paper, we propose to partially address this problem via the development of point pro- cess models that can be used to effectively simulate the location of individual households within small areal units.