Mining sequential patterns of PM2.5 pollution between 338 cities in China

Serious PM2.5 air pollution has persistently plagued and endangered most urban areas in China in recent years, and targeted policies are necessary to improve urban air quality ranging from macro policy (national level) to medium policy (city level) to micro policy (site specific). However, the macro-pattern study of air pollution between Chinese cities is inadequate, and not conducive to the formulation of macro-policy. To bridge this gap, we applied a sequential pattern mining algorithm to analyze the spatial-temporal patterns of PM2.5 pollution across Chinese cities during the period 2015 to 2018. The sequential patterns were collected from three levels of granularity on geographic areas and ten temporal scenarios covering time intervals from 10 to 100 h. Many underlying associative relationships were revealed between different cities by the mined patterns. The patterns were heterogeneous and presented five characteristics (i.e., clustering, symmetry, imbalance, decay, and stability). Each of the urban areas under investigation at different granularities was analyzed to identify the occurrence of associative relationships between it and other urban areas; moreover, we determined the degree of severity of such relationships. Our research results provide solid data that can be used as a reference by the various levels of Chinese governments for decision-making; overall, they can be used to improve the design of joint policies to prevent and control PM2.5 pollution in Chinese urban areas.