A hybrid deep learning air pollution prediction approach based on neighborhood selection and spatio-temporal attention.

Air pollution is a critical global environmental issue, further exacerbated by rapid industrialization and urbanization. Accurate prediction of air pollutant concentrations is essential for effective pollution prevention and control measures. The complex nature of pollutant data is influenced by fluctuating meteorological conditions, diverse pollution sources, and propagation processes, underscores the crucial importance of the spatial and temporal feature extraction for accurately predicting air pollutant concentrations. To address the challenges of data redundancy and diminished long-term prediction accuracy observed in previous studies, this paper presents an innovative approach to predict air pollutant concentrations leveraging advanced data analysis and deep learning methods. The proposed approach, termed KSC-ConvLSTM, integrates the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm, spatio-temporal attention (STA) mechanism, the residual block, and convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) neural network. The KNN algorithm adaptively selects highly correlated neighboring domains, while the residual block, enhanced with the STA mechanism, extracts spatial features from the input data. ConvLSTM further processes the output from STA-ConvNet to capture high-dimensional temporal and spatial features. The effectiveness of the KSC-ConvLSTM approach was validated through predictions of PM concentrations in Beijing and its surrounding urban agglomeration. The experimental results indicate that the KSC-ConvLSTM approach outperforms benchmark approaches in single-step, multi-step, and trend prediction. It demonstrates superior fitting accuracy and predictive performance. Quantitatively, the proposed KSC-ConvLSTM approach reduces the root mean square error (RMSE) by 4.216-8.458 for prediction averages of 1-12 h of PM in Beijing, compared with the benchmark approach. The findings show that the KSC-ConvLSTM approach shows considerable potential for predicting, preventing, and controlling air pollution.