Composite Travel Generative Adversarial Networks for Tabular and Sequential Population Synthesis

Agent-based microsimulation has become the standard to analyze intelligent transportation systems, using disaggregate travel demand data for entire populations, data that are not typically readily available. Population synthesis approaches are thus needed. We present Composite Travel Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN), a novel deep generative model to estimate the underlying joint distribution of a population, that is capable of reconstructing composite synthetic agents having tabular (e.g. age and sex) as well as sequential mobility data (e.g. trip trajectory and sequence). The CTGAN model is compared with other recently proposed methods such as the Variational Autoencoders (VAE) method, which has shown success in high dimensional tabular population synthesis. We evaluate the performance of the synthesized outputs based on distribution similarity, multi-variate correlations and spatio-temporal metrics. The results show the consistent and accurate generation of synthetic populations and their tabular and spatially sequential attributes, generated over varying spatial scales and dimensions.