Spatial Disaggregation of Historical Census Data Leveraging Multiple Sources of Ancillary Information

Abstract

High-resolution population grids built from historical census data can ease the analyses ofgeographical population changes, at the same time also facilitating the combination of populationdata with other GIS layers to perform analyses on a wide range of topics. This article reports onexperiments with a hybrid spatial disaggregation technique that combines the ideas of dasymetricmapping and pycnophylactic interpolation, using modern machine learning methods to combinedifferent types of ancillary variables, in order to disaggregate historical census data into a 200 mresolution grid. We specifically report on experiments related to the disaggregation of historicalpopulation counts from three different national censuses which took place around 1900, respectively inGreat Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The obtained results indicate that the proposed methodis indeed highly accurate, outperforming simpler disaggregation schemes based on mass-preservingareal weighting or pycnophylactic interpolation. The best results were obtained using modernregression methods (i.e., gradient tree boosting or convolutional neural networks, depending on thecase study), which previously have only seldom been used for spatial disaggregation.