An ensemble learning based hybrid model and framework for air pollution forecasting

As advance of economy and industry, the impact of air pollution has gradually gained attention. In order to predict air quality, there were many studies that exploited various machine learning techniques to build predictive model for pollutant concentration or air quality prediction. However, enhancing the prediction performance always is the common problem of existing studies. Traditional templates based on machine learning and deep learning methods, such as GBTR (gradient boosted tree regression), SVR (support vector machine-based regression), and LSTM (long short-term memory), are most promising approaches to address these problems. Some previous researches showed that ensemble learning technology can improve predictive performance of other domains. In order to improve the accuracy of forecasting, in this paper, we propose a hybrid model and framework to improve the forecasting accuracy of air pollution. We not only exploit stacking-based ensemble learning scheme with Pearson correlation coefficient to calculate the correlation between different machine learning models to integrate various forecasting models together, but also construct a framework based on Spark+Hadoop machine learning and TensorFlow deep learning framework to physically integrate these models to demonstrate the next 1 to 8 h’ air pollution forecasting. We also conduct experiments and compare the result with GBTR, SVR, LSTM, and LSTM2 (version 2) models to demonstrate the proposed hybrid model’s predictive performance. The experimental results show that the hybrid model is superior to the existing models used for predicting air pollution.