Air quality prediction by integrating mechanism model and machine learning model

AQP (Air Quality Prediction) is a very challenging project, and its core issue is how to solve the interaction and influence among meteorological, spatial and temporal factors. To address this central conundrum, we make full use of the characteristics of mechanism model and machine learning and propose a new AQP method based on DM_STGNN (Dynamic Multi-granularity Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Network). This method is the first time to use the air quality model HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory Model) to assist in building a dynamic spatio-temporal graph structure to learn the spatiotemporal relationship of pollutants. DM_STGNN is based on an elaborate encoder-decoder architecture. At the encoder, in order to better mine the spatial dependency, we built a multi-granularity graph structure, used meteorological, time and geographical features to establish node attributes, used well-known HYSPLIT model to dynamically establish the edges among nodes, and used LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) to learn the time-series relationship of pollutant concentrations. At the decoder, in order to better mine the temporal dependency, we built an attention mechanism based LSTM for decoding and AQP. Additionally, in order to efficiently learn the temporal patterns from very long-term historical time series and generate rich contextual information, an unsupervised pre-training model is used to enhance DM_STGNN. The proposed model makes full use of and fully considers the influence of meteorological, spatial and temporal factors, and integrates the advantages of mechanism model and machine learning. On a project-based dataset, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and examine its abilities of capturing both fine-grained and long-term influences in AQP. We also compare the proposed model with the state-of-the-art AQP methods on the dataset of Yangtze River Delta city group, the experimental results show the appealing performance of our model over competitive baselines.