Deep learning-based air pollution analysis on carbon monoxide in Taiwan

Abstract

Global air pollution poses a threat to humanity. Specifically, CO directly affects cardiovascular and other organ tissues and leads to numerous chronic diseases and major public health problems. The effective implementation of a deep learning model for predicting variations in CO levels would enable the early formulation of policies for controlling air pollution. In this study, a seasonal gated recurrent unit (SGRU) model, which is a deep learning time-series prediction model, was developed to predict the levels of CO in Taiwan. Atmospheric CO measurements from 2005 to 2021 were collected from the Environmental Protection Administration of Taiwan and preprocessed using the Kalman filter to achieve accurate forecasting. The performance of the proposed SGRU model was compared with that of the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), seasonal ARIMA, exponential smoothing (ETS), Holt–Winters ETS, support vector regression, and seasonal long short-term memory models in terms of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error. The SGRU model achieved the lowest MAPE value of 0.94, which demonstrated its superior performance. The construction of an accurate air pollution prediction model can assist government entities in formulating health and social care strategies and in planning future air pollution control measures.