SynC: A Unified Framework for Generating Synthetic Population with Gaussian Copula
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Synthetic population generation is the process of combining multiple socioeconomic and demographic datasets from different sources and/or granularity levels, and downscaling them to an individual level. Although it is a fundamental step for many data science tasks, an efficient and standard framework is absent. In this study, we propose a multi-stage framework called SynC (Synthetic Population via Gaussian Copula) to fill the gap. SynC first removes potential outliers in the data and then fits the filtered data with a Gaussian copula model to correctly capture dependencies and marginal distributions of sampled survey data. Finally, SynC leverages predictive models to merge datasets into one and then scales them accordingly to match the marginal constraints. We make three key contributions in this work: 1) propose a novel framework for generating individual level data from aggregated data sources by combining state-of-the-art machine learning and statistical techniques, 2) demonstrate its value as a feature engineering tool, as well as an alternative to data collection in situations where gathering is difficult through two real-world datasets, 3) release an easy-to-use framework implementation for reproducibility, and 4) ensure the methodology is scalable at the production level and can easily incorporate new data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".