PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF WEDDING RING IN AGENT-BASED DEMOGRAPHIC SIMULATION

Abstract

The applicability of Wedding Ring model to an agent-based demographic module is investigated. As interpretation of social simulation results requires in-depth understanding of phenomena from various angles in the spatio-temporal dimension, the agent-based modeling (ABM) approach in demographic and social studies gets popular. To provide with quantitative information about chronological dynamics, computational cost and influential networks for the implemented model, we first introduce the Wedding Ring model which captures empirical marriage patterns based on a micro-level hypothesis and its outputs which are directly affected by social interactions. Then, the key observations are examined at different points in time, population size, and distribution of social networks to check its desirability for representational details of ABMs. In conclusion, the presented model could be extended into a large-scale social laboratory with acceptable predictability and computation load to allow for investigating non-numerical characteristics while supporting traditional approaches in a complementary rather than competitive way.