Comparative study on the effects of meteorological and pollutant parameters on ANN modelling for prediction of SO2

Variations in meteorological parameters, different transportation mechanisms, complex reaction mechanisms and insufficient control measures have made control of ambient air pollution, a challenge. Prediction mechanisms for pollutant concentrations in advance have become necessary to regulate parameters within the acceptable limits. Artificial neural network (ANN) modelling can be used for predicting the concentrations of pollutants by establishing functional relationships between complex and nonlinear predictor variables and outputs. The application of time-series ANN models to predict air quality parameters was investigated by using six pollutant variables, five meteorological parameters and three time parameters to predict the concentration of SO2. An industrial belt in the southern part of India was selected as the study area.Two years of input parameters and feed-forward back propagation algorithm were used to construct the ANN model. Input parameters were optimized using forward selection and backward elimination techniques. Mean squared error and coefficient of determination were used to evaluate the models. The developed model exhibited very promising performance evaluation characteristics with the best model resulting in MSE of 0.0115 and R-2 value of 0.8979. The hybrid ANN models employing input parameter optimization techniques resulted in better performance characteristic values than conventional models. Any model exhibited a minimum reduction in MSE by 9% and 3% improvement in correlation. Pollutant parameters were found to affect the ANN models when compared to the meteorological parameters. Predicted values compared to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards were as low as 55% of the maximum allowable concentration in ambient air.