Particular matter prediction using synergy of multiple source urban big data in smart cities

Abstract

At present, the issue of air quality in populated urban areas is recognized as an environmental crisis. Air pollution affects the sustainability of the city. In controlling air pollution and protecting its hazards from humans, air quality data are very important. However, the costs of constructing and maintaining air quality registration infrastructure are very expensive and high, and air quality data recording at one point will not be generalizable to even a few kilometers. Some of the gains come from the integration of multiple data sources, which can never be achieved through independent single-source processing. Urban organizations in each city independently produce and record data relevant to the organization’s goals and objectives. These issues create separate data silos associated with an urban system. These data are varied in model and structure, and the integration of such data provides an appropriate opportunity to discover knowledge that can be useful in urban planning and decision making. This paper aims to show the generality of our previous research, which proposed a novel model to predict Particulate Matter (PM) as the main factor of air quality in the regions of the cities where air quality sensors are not available through urban big data resources integration, by extending the model and experiments with various configuration for different settings in smart cities. This work extends the evaluation scenarios of the model with the extended dataset of city of Aarhus, in Denmark, and compare the model performance against various specified baselines. Details of removing the heterogeneity of multiple data sources in the Multiple Data Set Aggregator & Heterogeneity Remover (MDA&HR) and improving the operation of Train Data Splitter (TDS) part of the model by focusing on the finding more similar pattern of air quality also are presented in this paper. The acceptable accuracy of the results shows the generality of the model.