Generating Feasible and Diverse Synthetic Populations Using Diffusion Models

Population synthesis is a critical task that involves generating synthetic yet realistic representations of populations. It is a fundamental problem in agent-based modeling (ABM), which has become the standard to analyze intelligent transportation systems. The synthetic population serves as the primary input for ABM transportation simulation, with traveling agents represented by population members. However, when the number of attributes describing agents becomes large, survey data often cannot densely support the joint distribution of the attributes in the population due to the curse of dimensionality. This sparsity makes it difficult to accurately model and produce the population. Interestingly, deep generative models trained from available sample data can potentially synthesize possible attribute combinations that present in the actual population but do not exist in the sample data(called sampling zeros). Nevertheless, this comes at the cost of falsely generating the infeasible attribute combinations that do not exist in the population (called structural zeros). In this study, a novel diffusion model-based population synthesis method is proposed to estimate the underlying joint distribution of a population. This approach enables the recovery of numerous missing sampling zeros while keeping the generated structural zeros minimal. Our method is compared with other recently proposed approaches such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approaches, which have shown success in high dimensional tabular population synthesis. We assess the performance of the synthesized outputs using a range of metrics, including marginal distribution similarity, feasibility, and diversity. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous approaches in achieving a better balance between the feasibility and diversity of the synthesized population.