Synthetic populations and microsimulations: applications in social science, celestial dynamics and beyond

Synthetic populations aim to create populations in a micro level, that fit data available at different aggregation levels. In demography or transport, their use is frequent, but many other domains suffer from a lack of data at the individual level and could benefit from the use of the same methods. Moreover, synthetic populations are often necessary as input to microsimulations, performing modelling (and forecasts) at the microlevel. This seminar will first briefly introduce the different concepts. Then, two different applications that have been implemented will be presented. The first one concerns a project called “Virtual Belgium In Health”. The second one considers the simulation of space debris in geostationary orbit, combining a deterministic model with synthetic populations techniques. Finally, the talk will discuss different other possible applications that could be developed.