  We present work on creating a synthetic population from census data for
Australia, applied to the greater Melbourne region. We use a sample-free
approach to population synthesis that does not rely on a disaggregate sample
from the original population. The inputs for our algorithm are joint marginal
distributions from census of desired person-level and household-level
attributes, and outputs are a set of comma-separated-value (.csv) files
containing the full synthetic population of unique individuals in households;
with age, gender, relationship status, household type, and size, matched to
census data. Our algorithm is efficient in that it can create the synthetic
population for Melbourne comprising 4.5 million persons in 1.8 million
households within three minutes on a modern computer. Code for the algorithm is
hosted on GitHub.
