Forecasting PM10 in Algiers: efficacy of multilayer perceptron networks

Air quality forecasting system has acquired high importance in atmospheric pollution due to its negative impacts on the environment and human health. The artificial neural network is one of the most common soft computing methods that can be pragmatic for carving such complex problem. In this paper, we used a multilayer perceptron neural network to forecast the daily averaged concentration of the respirable suspended particulates with aerodynamic diameter of not more than 10 mu m (PM10) in Algiers, Algeria. The data for training and testing the network are based on the data sampled from 2002 to 2006 collected by SAMASAFIA network center at El Hamma station. The meteorological data, air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed, are used as inputs network parameters in the formation of model. The training patterns used correspond to 41 days data. The performance of the developed models was evaluated on the basis index of agreement and other statistical parameters. It was seen that the overall performance of model with 15 neurons is better than the ones with 5 and 10 neurons. The results of multilayer network with as few as one hidden layer and 15 neurons were quite reasonable than the ones with 5 and 10 neurons. Finally, an error around 9 % has been reached.