An air quality prediction model based on improved Vanilla LSTM with multichannel input and multiroute output

Long short-term memory (LSTM), especially vanilla LSTM (VLSTM), has been widely used in air quality prediction field. However, VLSTM has many more parameters, thereby making training slow and prediction performance unstable. The VLSTM network input data have not been selected for better efficiency. In this paper, we propose an air quality prediction model based on the improved VLSTM with multichannel input and multiroute output (IVLSTM-MCMR). The proposed model includes the IVLSTM and MCMR modules. The proposed IVLSTM module is developed by improving the VLSTM inner structure of VLSTM in order to reduce the number of parameters that help to accelerate the convergence. A new historical information usage approach is further proposed to obtain a stable training process. For the MCMR module, a multichannel data input model (MC) with an improved linear similarity dynamic time warping is introduced to choose the valid data as the input of IVLSTM. A multiroute output model (MR) is designed to integrate the results from MC, in which the results of different target stations with different features are output by different routes. We evaluate the proposed model with the collected data from Beijing, China, and the experimental results show that our model achieves improvements regarding the predication performance.