Spatiotemporal informer: A new approach based on spatiotemporal embedding and attention for air quality forecasting.

Accurate prediction of air pollution is essential for public health protection. Air quality, however, is difficult to predict due to the complex dynamics, and its accurate forecast still remains a challenge. This study suggests a spatiotemporal Informer model, which uses a new spatiotemporal embedding and spatiotemporal attention, to improve AQI forecast accuracy. In the first phase of the proposed forecast mechanism, the input data is transformed by the spatiotemporal embedding. Next, the spatiotemporal attention is applied to extract spatiotemporal features from the embedded data. The final forecast is obtained based on the attention tensors. In the proposed forecast model, the input is a 3-dimensional data that consists of air quality data (AQI, PM2.5, O3, SO2, NO2, CO) and geographic information, and the output is a multi-positional, multi-temporal data that shows the AQI forecast result of all the monitoring stations in the study area. The proposed forecast model was evaluated by air quality data of 34 monitoring stations in Beijing, China. Experiments showed that the proposed forecast model could provide highly accurate AQI forecast: the average of MAPE values for from 1 h to 20 h ahead forecast was 11.61%, and it was much smaller than other models. Moreover, the proposed model provided a highly accurate and stable forecast even at the extreme points. These results demonstrated that the proposed spatiotemporal embedding and attention techniques could sufficiently capture the spatiotemporal correlation characteristics of air quality data, and that the proposed spatiotemporal Informer could be successfully applied for air quality forecasting.

Water quality forecasting based on data decomposition, fuzzy clustering and deep learning neural network.

Water quality forecasting can provide useful information for public health protection and support water resources management. In order to forecast water quality more accurately, this paper proposes a novel hybrid model by combining data decomposition, fuzzy C-means clustering and bidirectional gated recurrent unit. Firstly, the original water quality data is decomposed into several subseries by empirical wavelet transform, and then, the decomposed subseries are recombined by fuzzy C-means clustering. Next, for each clustered series, bidirectional gated recurrent unit is applied to develop prediction model. Finally, the forecast result is obtained by the summation of the predictions for the subseries. The proposed forecast model is evaluated by the water quality data of Poyang Lake, China. Results show that the proposed forecast model provides highly accurate forecast result for all of the six water quality data: the average of MAPE of the forecast results for the six water quality datasets is 4.59% for 7 day ahead prediction. Furthermore, our model shows better forecast performance than the other models. Particularly, compared with the single BiGRU model, MAPE decreased by 32.86% in average. Results demonstrate that the proposed forecast model can be used effectively for water quality forecasting.

Forecasting air pollutant concentration using a novel spatiotemporal deep learning model based on clustering, feature selection and empirical wavelet transform.

Accurate forecasting of air pollutant concentration is of great importance since it is an essential part of the early warning system. However, it still remains a challenge due to the limited information of emission source and high uncertainties of the dynamic processes. In order to improve the accuracy of air pollutant concentration forecast, this study proposes a novel hybrid model using clustering, feature selection, real-time decomposition by empirical wavelet transform, and deep learning neural network. First, all air pollutant time series are decomposed by empirical wavelet transform based on real-time decomposition, and subsets of output data are constructed by combining corresponding decomposed components. Second, each subset of output data is classified into several clusters by clustering algorithm, and then appropriate inputs are selected by feature selection method. Third, a deep learning-based predictor, which uses three dimensional convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory neural network, is applied to predict decomposition components of each cluster. Last, air pollutant concentration forecast for each monitoring station is obtained by reconstructing predicted values of all the decomposition components. PM2.5 concentration data of Beijing, China is used to validate and test our model. Results show that the proposed model outperforms other models used in this study. In our model, mean absolute percentage error for 1, 6, 10 h ahead PM2.5 concentration prediction is 4.03%, 6.87%, and 8.98%, respectively. These outcomes demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model is a powerful tool to provide highly accurate forecast for air pollutant concentration.