A Hybrid Air Quality Prediction Model Based on Empirical Mode Decomposition

Air pollution is a severe environmental problem in urban areas. Accurate air quality prediction can help governments and individuals make proper decisions to cope with potential air pollution. As a classic time series forecasting model, the AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) has been widely adopted in air quality prediction. However, because of the volatility of air quality and the lack of additional context information, i.e., the spatial relationships among monitor stations, traditional ARIMA models suffer from unstable prediction performance. Though some deep networks can achieve higher accuracy, a mass of training data, heavy computing, and time cost are required. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model to simultaneously predict seven air pollution indicators from multiple monitoring stations. The proposed model consists of three components: (1) an extended ARIMA to predict matrix series of multiple air quality indicators from several adjacent monitoring stations; (2) the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to decompose the air quality time series data into multiple smooth sub-series; and (3) the truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to compress and denoise the expanded matrix. Experimental results on the public dataset show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-art air quality forecasting models in both accuracy and time cost.