A Short-Term Air Pollutant Concentration Forecasting Method Based on a Hybrid Neural Network and Metaheuristic Optimization Algorithms

Abstract

In the contemporary era, global air quality has been adversely affected by technological progress, urban development, population expansion, and the proliferation of industries and power plants. Recognizing the urgency of addressing air pollution consequences, the prediction of the concentration levels of air pollutants has become crucial. This study focuses on the short-term prediction of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), prominent air pollutants emitted by the Kerman Combined Cycle Power Plant, from May to September 2019. The proposed method utilizes a new two-step feature selection (FS) process, a hybrid neural network (HNN), and the Coot optimization algorithm (COOT). This combination of FS and COOT selects the most relevant input features while eliminating redundant ones, leading to improved prediction accuracy. The application of HNN for training further enhances the accuracy significantly. To assess the model’s performance, two datasets, including real data from two different parts of Combined Cycle Power Plant in Kerman, Iran, from 1 May 2019 to 30 September 2019 (namely dataset A and B), are utilized. Subsequently, mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square deviation (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) were employed to obtain the accuracy of FS-HNN-COOT. Experimental results showed MSE of FS-HNN-COOT for NO2 ranged from 0.002 to 0.005, MAE from 0.016 to 0.0492, RMSE from 0.0142 to 0.0736, and MAEP from 4.21% to 8.69%. Also, MSE, MAE, RMSE, and MAPE ranged from 0.0001 to 0.0137, 0.0108 to 0.0908, 0.0137 to 0.1173, and 9.03% to 15.93%, respectively, for SO2.