[Population Modeling] Matching people into relationships

[Nathan Geffen]

Dear All

Stefan and I have published a paper analysing several algorithms that pair
agents in microsimulations or agent-based models. This models  people
forming sexual relationships in a natural population (very coarsely of
course). It has uses for modelling sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Some of the algorithms are fast and do a reasonable job of approximating
the underlying distribution of relationships. In our current (not yet
published) work, we run microsimulations of 40 million agents, modelling
daily updates for 10 years, and it takes a little over 5 hours to complete
a single simulation on a mid-range Lenova i5.

We hope our paper is useful to researchers working on STI microsimulations
who are struggling with this. We will shortly submit a follow-up paper that
uses some of these algorithms in a microsimulation of STIs. All our code is
open source (C++, with a bit of R for analysis - license is GPL v3) and on
Github. You are welcome to email me if you have questions about how to use
it, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions for improvement (I may be a little
slow to reply).

Here is the paper:
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/8.html

Here is the pair-matching algorithm code:
https://github.com/nathangeffen/pairmatchingalgorithms

And here is our new microsimulation code, which is still rough around the
edges:
https://github.com/nathangeffen/faststi

Regards
Nathan Geffen
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