A bottom-up population modelling approach to complement the population and housing census

Darin, Edith, Boo, Gianluca and Tatem, Andrew (2021) A bottom-up population modelling approach to complement the population and housing census. XXIX International Population Conference (IPC2021), India. 05 - 10 Dec 2021. 4 pp .

Abstract

Population and housing censuses provide essential demographic information for local, national and international decision-making and response. However, census data in the most vulnerable countries are often outdated or partial because political instability, conflict and natural disasters prevent a nationwide enumeration. The bottom-up modelling approach complements outdated or incomplete census data by estimating population counts and age/sex structures in grid cells of about 100 m using required population data on a set of fully enumerated locations and auxiliary geospatial covariates. We present the modelling effort in the Democratic Republic of Congo - the last census was conducted in 1984 - and in Burkina Faso - the last census was conducted in 2020 but covered only 70% of the country. Both models showed good predictive performance, denoted by R2 values of 0.73 and 0.63 for the respective out-of-sample predictions of population counts. The resulting bottom-up and gridded population estimates are currently used for census support and humanitarian response in both countries. This work has highlighted the flexibility of the bottom-up modelling approach, in terms of input population data, model specification and aggregation of population estimates to support specific use cases.

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Contributors

Author: Edith Darin

Author: Gianluca Boo

Author: Andrew Tatem

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