MLP based predictive model for surface ozone concentration over an urban area in the Gangetic West Bengal during pre-monsoon season

The present paper reports a comparative study among two neurocomputing models in the form of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models and non-linear regression for the prediction of surface ozone (O-3) during pre-monsoon season over Gangetic West Bengal (GWB), India considering NOx, SO2, PM10 and temperature as predictors. Learning the MLPs through gradient descent (GD) with tanhyperbolic and sigmoid nonlinearities, we found that all the models under consideration have almost the same degrees of prediction efficiency for O-3 over GWB during pre-monsoon season with the said predictors. However, the MLP model with tanhyperbolic activation function is found to produce a significantly higher correlation and Willmott's index of agreement between actual and predicted O-3 than the other models. Finally, MLP with GD learning characterized by tanhyperbolic nonlinearity is identified to have significant efficiency in surface ozone prediction over the region as mentioned above.