Multi-horizon air pollution forecasting with deep neural networks

Air pollution is a global problem, especially in urban areas where the population density is very high due to the diverse pollutant sources such as vehicles, industrial plants, buildings, and waste. North Macedonia, as a developing country, has a serious problem with air pollution. The problem is highly present in its capital city, Skopje, where air pollution places it consistently within the top 10 cities in the world during the winter months. In this work, we propose using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models with long short-term memory units to predict the level of PM10 particles at 6, 12, and 24 h in the future. We employ historical air quality measurement data from sensors placed at multiple locations in Skopje and meteorological conditions such as temperature and humidity. We compare different deep learning models’ performance to an Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. The obtained results show that the proposed models consistently outperform the baseline model and can be successfully employed for air pollution prediction. Ultimately, we demonstrate that these models can help decision-makers and local authorities better manage the air pollution consequences by taking proactive measures.