Dasymetric Modelling of Population Distribution – Large Data Approach

Existing resources of population data, provided by national censuses in the form of areal aggregates, have usually insufficient resolution for many practical applications. Dasymetric modelling has been a standard technique to disaggregate census aggregates into finer grids. Although dasymetric modelling of population distribution is well-established, most literature focuses on proposing new variants of the technique, while only few are devoted to developing broad-scale population grids that could be used for real-life applications. This paper reviews literature on construction of broad-scale population grids using dasymetric modelling. It also describes an R implementation of fully automated framework to calculate such grids from aggregated data provided by national censuses. The presented implementation has been used to produce high resolution, multi-year comparable, U.S.-wide population datasets that are the part of the SocScape (Social Landscape) project.