Paradigm, Theories and Methods of Computational Demography

As a science of digitalizing and computerizing human behavior, computational demography is not only the basis of computational social science, but also the key and grasp of computational social science. The disciplinary paradigm of computational demography has five characteristics: it will transform from the profiling demography to the panoramic demography; it will bridge the formal demography and population research; it will lead to the change of population research methods from the hypothetical cohort analysis to the extended cohort analysis; it will expand the connotation of population from human population to digital population and intelligent population; it will transform from the macro-demography which emphasizes group statistics to micro-demography which pays more attention to individual statistics. The third demographic transition theory, subjectivity theory and the theory of the unity of man and nature have become the theoretical basis of computational demography. The main technical methods of computational demography are extended cohort method, online survey and experiment, online genealogy and agent-based modeling. As an emerging science, computational demography faces both opportunities and challenges. It is necessary to strengthen interdisciplinary and industry-university-research cooperation, strengthen the construction of data infrastructure and research norms, enrich application scenarios, and pay attention to the impact of computational demography on personal security, privacy protection, ethics and other aspects.