Enhanced Sequence-to-Sequence Attention-Based PM2.5 Concentration Forecasting Using Spatiotemporal Data

Severe air pollution problems continue to increase because of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. Specifically, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) causes respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and according to the World Health Organization (WHO), millions of premature deaths and significant health burdens annually. Therefore, PM2.5 concentration forecasting is essential. This study proposed a method to forecast PM2.5 concentrations one hour after using Sequence-to-Sequence Attention (Seq2Seq-attention). The proposed method selects neighboring stations using minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) and integrates their data using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed attention score and Seq2Seq are used on the integrated data to forecast PM2.5 concentration after one hour. The performance of the proposed method is validated through two case studies. The first comparison evaluated the performance of the conventional attention score against the proposed attention scores. The second comparison evaluated the forecasting results with and without considering neighboring stations. The first study showed that the proposed attention score improved the performance index (Root Mean Square Error (RMSE): 3.48%p, Mean Absolute Error (MAE): 8.60%p, R-2: 0.49%p, relative Root Mean Square Error (rRMSE): 3.64%p, Percent Bias (PBIAS): 59.29%p). The second case study showed that considering neighboring stations' data can be more effective in forecasting than considering that of a standalone station (RMSE: 5.49%p, MAE: 0.51%p, R-2: 0.67%p, rRMSE: 5.44%p, PBIAS: 46.56%p). This confirmed that the proposed method can effectively forecast the PM2.5 concentration after one hour.