Air Quality Prediction Based on a Spatiotemporal Attention Mechanism

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things and Big Data, smart cities have received increasing attention. Predicting air quality accurately and efficiently is an important part of building a smart city. However, air quality prediction is very challenging because it is affected by many complex factors, such as dynamic spatial correlation between air quality detection sensors, dynamic temporal correlation, and external factors (such as road networks and points of interest). Therefore, this paper proposes a long short-term memory (LSTM) air quality prediction model based on a spatiotemporal attention mechanism (STA-LSTM). The model uses an encoder-decoder structure to model spatiotemporal features. A spatial attention mechanism is introduced in the encoder to capture the relative influence of surrounding sites on the prediction area. A temporal attention mechanism is introduced in the decoder to capture the time dependence of air quality. In addition, for spatial data such as point of interest (POI) and road networks, this paper uses the LINE graph embedding method to obtain a low-dimensional vector representation of spatial data to obtain abundant spatial features. This paper evaluates STA-LSTM on the Beijing dataset, and the root mean square error (RMSE) and R-squared ( $R^2$ ) indicators are used to compare with six benchmarks. The experimental results show that the model proposed in this paper can achieve better performance than the performances of other benchmarks.