A Comparison of LSTM and BiLSTM for Forecasting the Air Pollution Index and Meteorological Conditions in Jakarta

Abstract

Jakarta is the capital city of Indonesia where air pollution becomes one of the problems that must be properly handled. The historical data of the air pollution index is beneficial for developing models for forecasting future values. One of the advantages of forecasting air pollution is to help people to arrange future plans to reduce the dangerous effect on health. Analyzing a record of meteorological conditions can be used to understand climate change. This paper reports the comparison of Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) models for multivariate forecasting of the air pollution index and meteorological conditions in Jakarta. It also informs the performance of those algorithms for forecasting the observed variables before and during the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak to analyze the effect of the pandemic on the environment. The experiments use a historical time series dataset from 2010 - 2021. The experimental results show that LSTM and BiLSTM work well to forecast PM <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">10</inf> , temperature, humidity, and wind speed. In this case study, there are no significant differences in the performance of LSTM and BiLSTM.