Extracting mass concentration time series features for classification of indoor and outdoor atmospheric particulates

Particulate matters (PMs) are considered as one of the air pollutants generally associated with poor air quality in both outdoor and indoor environments. The composition, distribution and size of these particles hazardously affect the human health causing cardiovascular health problems, lung dysfunction, respiratory problems, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lungs cancer. Classification models developed by analyzing mass concentration time series data of atmospheric particulate matter can be used for the prediction of air quality and for issuing warnings to protect the health of the public. In this study, mass concentration time series data of both outdoor and indoor particulates matters PM2.5 (aerodynamics size up to 2.5 mu) and PM10.0 (aerodynamics size up to 10.0 mu) were acquired using Haz-Dust EPAM-5000 from six different locations of the Muzaffarabad city, Azad Kashmir. The linear and nonlinear approaches were used to extract mass concentration time series features of the indoor and outdoor atmospheric particulates. These features were given as an input to the robust machine learning classifiers. The support vector machine (SVM) kernels, ensemble classifiers, decision tree and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) are used to classify the indoor and outdoor particulate matter time series. The performance was estimated in terms of area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, true negative rate, true positive rate, negative predictive value and positive predictive value. The highest accuracy (95.8%) was obtained using cubic and coarse Gaussian SVM along with the cosine and cubic KNN, while the highest AUC, i.e., 1.00, is obtained using fine Gaussian and cubic SVM as well as with the cubic and weighted KNN.