A Hybrid Deep Learning Model to Forecast Particulate Matter Concentration Levels in Seoul, South Korea

Both long- and short-term exposure to high concentrations of airborne particulate matter (PM) severely affect human health. Many countries now regulate PM concentrations. Early-warning systems based on PM concentration levels are urgently required to allow countermeasures to reduce harm and loss. Previous studies sought to establish accurate, efficient predictive models. Many machine-learning methods are used for air pollution forecasting. The long short-term memory and gated recurrent unit methods, typical deep-learning methods, reliably predict PM levels with some limitations. In this paper, the authors proposed novel hybrid models to combine the strength of two types of deep learning methods. Moreover, the authors compare hybrid deep-learning methods (convolutional neural network (CNN)—long short-term memory (LSTM) and CNN—gated recurrent unit (GRU)) with several stand-alone methods (LSTM, GRU) in terms of predicting PM concentrations in 39 stations in Seoul. Hourly air pollution data and meteorological data from January 2015 to December 2018 was used for these training models. The results of the experiment confirmed that the proposed prediction model could predict the PM concentrations for the next 7 days. Hybrid models outperformed single models in five areas selected randomly with the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) values for both PM10 and PM2.5. The error rate for PM10 prediction in Gangnam with RMSE is 1.688, and MAE is 1.161. For hybrid models, the CNN–GRU better-predicted PM10 for all stations selected, while the CNN–LSTM model performed better on predicting PM2.5.