A Model-driven and Data-driven Fusion Framework for Accurate Air Quality Prediction

Abstract

Air quality is closely related to public health. Health issues such as cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases, may have connection with long exposure to highly polluted environment. Therefore, accurate air quality forecasts are extremely important to those who are vulnerable. To estimate the variation of several air pollution concentrations, previous researchers used various approaches, such as the Community Multiscale Air Quality model (CMAQ) or neural networks. Although CMAQ model considers a coverage of the historic air pollution data and meteorological variables, extra bias is introduced due to additional adjustment. In this paper, a combination of model-based strategy and data-driven method namely the physical-temporal collection(PTC) model is proposed, aiming to fix the systematic error that traditional models deliver. In the data-driven part, the first components are the temporal pattern and the weather pattern to measure important features that contribute to the prediction performance. The less relevant input variables will be removed to eliminate negative weights in network training. Then, we deploy a long-short-term-memory (LSTM) to fetch the preliminary results, which will be further corrected by a neural network (NN) involving the meteorological index as well as other pollutants concentrations. The data-set we applied for forecasting is from January 1st, 2016 to December 31st, 2016. According to the results, our PTC achieves an excellent performance compared with the baseline model (CMAQ prediction, GRU, DNN and etc.). This joint model-based data-driven method for air quality prediction can be easily deployed on stations without extra adjustment, providing results with high-time-resolution information for vulnerable members to prevent heavy air pollution ahead.