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How to Bring Survey Data to Life: Simulating the Daily Life of a European
What if survey data could tell a story? Learn how probability density fitting can turn aggregate statistics into thousands of simulated daily routines.
Eurostat’s European Time Use Surveys describe how people spend their day, but only as aggregates: per country, sex, and age class, how many people do an activity and how long it takes. In this blog, I show how to turn the survey table into simulated days using probability density fitting (PDF). For each country and activity, we model one distribution for the participation rate and one for minutes per day. These models form the basis for generating data, together with the assumption about the ordering. The result is a log file that can be animated and used for storytelling with the MovingBubbles chart of D3Blocks.
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