Fine-Grained Urban Air Quality Mapping from Sparse Mobile Air Pollution Measurements and Dense Traffic Density

Urban air quality mapping has been widely applied in urban planning, air pollution control and personal air pollution exposure assessment. Urban air quality maps are traditionally derived using measurements from fixed monitoring stations. Due to high cost, these stations are generally sparsely deployed in a few representative locations, leading to a highly generalized air quality map. In addition, urban air quality varies rapidly over short distances (<1 km) and is influenced by meteorological conditions, road network and traffic flow. These variations are not well represented in coarse-grained air quality maps generated by conventional fixed-site monitoring methods but have important implications for characterizing heterogeneous personal air pollution exposures and identifying localized air pollution hotspots. Therefore, fine-grained urban air quality mapping is indispensable. In this context, supplementary low-cost mobile sensors make mobile air quality monitoring a promising alternative. Using sparse air quality measurements collected by mobile sensors and various contextual factors, especially traffic flow, we propose a context-aware locally adapted deep forest (CLADF) model to infer the distribution of NO2 by 100 m and 1 h resolution for fine-grained air quality mapping. The CLADF model exploits deep forest to construct a local model for each cluster consisting of nearest neighbor measurements in contextual feature space, and considers traffic flow as an important contextual feature. Extensive validation experiments were conducted using mobile NO2 measurements collected by 17 postal vans equipped with low-cost sensors operating in Antwerp, Belgium. The experimental results demonstrate that the CLADF model achieves the lowest RMSE as well as advances in accuracy and correlation, compared with various benchmark models, including random forest, deep forest, extreme gradient boosting and support vector regression.

Automated summary

Urban air quality mapping plays a crucial role in urban planning, air pollution control, and personal air pollution exposure assessment. Traditional fixed monitoring stations are limited in providing fine-grained air quality maps due to their sparse deployment and inability to capture short-distance variations influenced by factors such as meteorology, road network, and traffic flow. In this study, a context-aware locally adapted deep forest (CLADF) model is proposed to infer the distribution of NO2 with high resolution using measurements from low-cost mobile sensors and contextual factors, particularly traffic flow. The CLADF model outperforms various benchmark models in terms of accuracy and correlation according to extensive validation experiments using mobile NO2 measurements collected in Antwerp, Belgium.