  We compare a sample-free method proposed by Gargiulo et al. (2010) and a
sample-based method proposed by Ye et al. (2009) for generating a synthetic
population, organised in households, from various statistics. We generate a
reference population for a French region including 1310 municipalities and
measure how both methods approximate it from a set of statistics dervied from
this reference population. We also perform sensitivity analysis. The
sample-free method better fits the reference distributions of both individuals
and households. It is also less data demanding but it requires more
pre-processing. The quality of the results for the sample-based method is
highly dependent on the quality of the initial sample.
