Point process models for household distributions within small areal units

Spatio-demographic data sets are increasingly available worldwide, permitting ever more realistic modeling and analysis of social processes ranging from mobility to disease transmission. 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 process models that can be used to effectively simulate the location of individual households within small areal units. 1 Corresponding author. Department of Sociology; University of California, Irvine. Email: [email protected]. 2 Department of Statistics and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences; University of California, Irvine. http://www.demographic-research.org 593 Almquist & Butts: Point process models for household distributions within small areal units