Rachel Davidson

Xiao Qian, Shangjia Dong, Rachel Davidson

Accurately understanding the interactions between humans and the built environment requires integrated representations of both the buildings and the populations that occupy them. However, high-fidelity datasets that jointly capture detailed housing structures and demographic characteristics at the household level do not currently exist. This paper presents a framework for constructing a joint housing-household inventory that explicitly links individuals and households to compatible housing units from the National Structure Inventory (NSI), while preserving realistic population densities and demographic distributions. The framework integrates three components: (i) synthetic population generation from American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) records that preserve complex intra-household relationships; (ii) a deep contrastive learning model that quantifies housing-household compatibility; and (iii) a hierarchical optimization-based allocation procedure that enforces building-level capacity and block-group-level demographic constraints. The generated synthetic population attains high statistical realism relative to the census microdata, and the contrastive learning model identifies compatible housing-household pairs with high predictive accuracy. Applied to coastal North Carolina, evaluations at building, neighborhood, and regional scales show that the joint inventory matches block-group-level demographic distributions, reproduces observed spatial population patterns without systematic bias, and maintains consistent allocation quality across urban, suburban, and rural contexts. By enabling coupled household- and building-level analyses, the resulting inventory supports a broad range of applications, including disaster resilience planning, housing and affordability analysis, energy-use assessment, and public health research.

Xiao Qian, Shangjia Dong, Rachel Davidson

Housing and household characteristics are key determinants of social and economic well-being, yet our understanding of their interrelationships remains limited. This study addresses this knowledge gap by developing a deep contrastive learning (DCL) model to infer housing-household relationships using the American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). More broadly, the proposed model is suitable for a class of problems where the goal is to learn joint relationships between two distinct entities without explicitly labeled ground truth data. Our proposed dual-encoder DCL approach leverages co-occurrence patterns in PUMS and introduces a bisect K-means clustering method to overcome the absence of ground truth labels. The dual-encoder DCL architecture is designed to handle the semantic differences between housing (building) and household (people) features while mitigating noise introduced by clustering. To validate the model, we generate a synthetic ground truth dataset and conduct comprehensive evaluations. The model further demonstrates its superior performance in capturing housing-household relationships in Delaware compared to state-of-the-art methods. A transferability test in North Carolina confirms its generalizability across diverse sociodemographic and geographic contexts. Finally, the post-hoc explainable AI analysis using SHAP values reveals that tenure status and mortgage information play a more significant role in housing-household matching than traditionally emphasized factors such as the number of persons and rooms.

Xiao Qian, Utkarsh Gangwal, Shangjia Dong et al.

Household and individual-level sociodemographic data are essential for understanding human-infrastructure interaction and policymaking. However, the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) offers only a sample at the state level, while census tract data only provides the marginal distributions of variables without correlations. Therefore, we need an accurate synthetic population dataset that maintains consistent variable correlations observed in microdata, preserves household-individual and individual-individual relationships, adheres to state-level statistics, and accurately represents the geographic distribution of the population. We propose a deep generative framework leveraging the variational autoencoder (VAE) to generate a synthetic population with the aforementioned features. The methodological contributions include (1) a new data structure for capturing household-individual and individual-individual relationships, (2) a transfer learning process with pre-training and fine-tuning steps to generate households and individuals whose aggregated distributions align with the census tract marginal distribution, and (3) decoupled binary cross-entropy (D-BCE) loss function enabling distribution shift and out-of-sample records generation. Model results for an application in Delaware, USA demonstrate the ability to ensure the realism of generated household-individual records and accurately describe population statistics at the census tract level compared to existing methods. Furthermore, testing in North Carolina, USA yielded promising results, supporting the transferability of our method.