Prediction of PM10 Concentration in Dry Bulk Ports Using a Combined Deep Learning Model Considering Feature Meteorological Factors

Abstract

Accurate prediction of PM10 concentration is important for effectively managing PM10 exposure and mitigating health and economic risks posed to humans in dry bulk ports. However, accurately capturing the time-series nonlinear variation characteristics of PM10 concentration is challenging owing to the specific intensity of port operation activities and the influence of meteorological factors. To address such challenges, a novel combined deep learning model （CLAF） was proposed, merging cascaded convolutional neural networks （CNN）, long short-term memory （LSTM）, and an attention mechanism （AM）. This integrated model aimed to forecast hourly PM10 concentration in dry bulk ports. First, using the random forest characteristic importance algorithm, the distinct meteorological factors were identified among the selected five meteorological factors. These selected factors were incorporated into the prediction model along with the PM10 concentration. Subsequently, the CNN layer was employed to extract high-dimensional time-varying features from the input variables, while the LSTM layer captured sequential features and long-term dependencies. In the AM layer, different weights were assigned to the output components of the LSTM layer to amplify the effects of important information. Finally, three evaluation metrics were applied to compare the performance of the CLAF model with three basic models and three commonly used prediction models. Real-case data was collected and used in this study. Comparison results demonstrated that considering the meteorological factors could improve the prediction accuracy and fitting performance of PM10 concentration in ports. The CLAF model reduced the mean absolute error statistic by 13.92%-56.9%, decreased the mean square error statistic by 45.99%-81.02%, and improved the goodness-of-fit statistic by 3.2%-15.5%.