Analytical Equations based Prediction Approach for PM2.5 using Artificial Neural Network

Particulate matter pollution is one of the deadliest types of air pollution worldwide due to its significant impacts on the global environment and human health. Particulate Matter (PM2.5) is one of the important particulate pollutants to measure the Air Quality Index (AQI). The conventional instruments used by the air quality monitoring stations to monitor PM2.5 are costly, bulkier, time-consuming, and power-hungry. Furthermore, due to limited data availability and non-scalability, these stations cannot provide high spatial and temporal resolution in real-time. To overcome the disadvantages of existing methodology this article presents analytical equations based prediction approach for PM2.5 using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Since the derived analytical equations for the prediction can be computed using a Wireless Sensor Node (WSN) or low-cost processing tool, it demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach. Moreover, the study related to correlation among the PM2.5 and other pollutants is performed to select the appropriate predictors. The large authenticate data set of Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) online station, India is used for the proposed approach. The RMSE and coefficient of determination (R2) obtained for the proposed prediction approach using eight predictors are 1.7973 ug/m3 and 0.9986 respectively. While the proposed approach results show RMSE of 7.5372 ug/m3 and R2 of 0.9708 using three predictors. Therefore, the results demonstrate that the proposed approach is one of the promising approaches for monitoring PM2.5 without power-hungry gas sensors and bulkier analyzers.