A Novel Combined Model for Air Quality Index Forecasting in Changchun

Abstract

With the rapid development of the economy and continuous improvement in people’s living standards, the predictions of the air quality index have attracted wide attention. In this paper, a new feature selection method (Pearson-MI) and a combined model construction method (modified inverse variance method) were proposed to study the air quality index (AQI) and its influencing factors in Changchun. The Pearson-MI method selects the factors that affect the AQI of Changchun City from many influencing factors. This method reduces the RMSE of the LSTM model and XGBoost model by 27% and 5% and the MAE by 41% and 5%, respectively. A model that combines XGBoost, SVR, RF, and LSTM was constructed using the inverse variance method to predict the air quality index of Changchun City. The modified combined model resulted in a 2% reduction in RMSE and a 0.6% reduction in MAE compared with the unmodified combined model. The numerical results of our study show that the prediction accuracy of the modified combined model is obviously higher than that of the basic model, and the prediction accuracy is further improved under the Pearson-MI feature selection.