Prediction of Air Pollutant Levels by Using Artificial Neural Networks and Statistical Methods

One of the environmental problems adversely affecting human health and welfare in many part of world is air pollution. Pollution monitoring data can be utilized to predict concentrations of air pollutants for short-term using artificial intelligence approaches and multivariate regression analysis. In this paper, artificial neural networks (ANNs) and multivariate regression modeling (MRM) techniques have been comparatively employed to forecast one-hour ahead concentration of particulate air pollution (PM10). An hourly based data was composed by including meteorological factors and particulate concentrations for the years 2015-2016. ANN(12-7-1) model with R2 of 0.887 and RMSE of 19.89 yielded fairly rational predictions over hourly dataset while the best MRM models produced lower scores with R2 of 0.848 and RMSE of 21.33 in general. ANN models simulating the time series data better among the models identified have been chosen in further tuning in the prediction of next hour’s concentration of PM10.