Introduction to demography

Demography, originally formulated as the study of vital statistics about a population, measures individual characteristics across a population of interest. Vital records about a population are important for public policy creation, epidemic tracking, urban planning, and many other government tasks critical for infrastructure and growth. John Snow pioneered the field of demography during the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, plotting geographic data and shared characteristics of infected individuals to determine the source of the cholera outbreak (a water pump). Since then, demography has played a prominent role in medical research, policy planning, education reform, and other applications of the social sciences to society’s needs.

In this chapter, we’ll introduce some important aspects of demographic research and how we can use shared demographic and geographic factors to create networks by connecting vertices with edges based on shared geographies...