Incorporating the Third Law of Geography with Spatial Attention Module–Convolutional Neural Network–Transformer for Fine-Grained Non-Stationary Air Quality Predictive Learning

Abstract

Accurate air quality prediction is paramount in safeguarding public health and addressing air pollution control. However, previous studies often ignore the geographic similarity among different monitoring stations and face challenges in dynamically capturing different spatial–temporal relationships between stations. To address this, an air quality predictive learning approach incorporating the Third Law of Geography with SAM–CNN–Transformer is proposed. Firstly, the Third Law of Geography is incorporated to fully consider the geographical similarity among stations via a variogram and spatial clustering. Subsequently, a spatial–temporal attention convolutional network that combines the spatial attention module (SAM) with the convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer is designed. The SAM is employed to extract spatial–temporal features from the input data. The CNN is utilized to capture local information and relationships among each input feature. The Transformer is applied to capture time dependencies across long-distance time series. Finally, Shapley’s analysis is employed to interpret the model factors. Numerous experiments with two typical air pollutants (PM2.5, PM10) in Haikou City show that the proposed approach has better comprehensive performance than baseline models. The proposed approach offers an effective and practical methodology for fine-grained non-stationary air quality predictive learning.