Time series AQI forecasting using Kalman-integrated Bi-GRU and Chi-square divergence optimization.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

Air pollution has become a pressing global concern, demanding accurate forecasting systems to safeguard public health. Existing AQI prediction models often falter due to missing data, high variability, and limited ability to handle distributional uncertainty. This study introduces a novel deep learning framework that integrates Kalman Attention with a Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) for robust AQI time-series forecasting. Unlike conventional attention mechanisms, Kalman Attention dynamically adjusts to data uncertainty, enhancing temporal feature weighting. Additionally, we incorporate a Chi-square Divergence-based regularization term into the loss function to explicitly minimize the distributional mismatch between predicted and actual pollutant levels-a contribution not explored in prior AQI models. Missing values are imputed using a pollutant-specific ARIMA model to preserve time-dependent trends. The proposed system is evaluated using real-world data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2022-2024) across six major pollutants (CO, NO[Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]) in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood region. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models (LSTM, CNN-LSTM), achieving an [Formula: see text] of 0.96794, MSE of 4.11×10[Formula: see text], and MAE of 0.000423. This work advances AQI forecasting by addressing uncertainty, distributional alignment, and missing data within a unified architecture, providing a scalable solution for environmental monitoring and policy support.

Authors

  • Narmeen Fatima
    Applied INTelligence Lab (AINTLab), Seoul, 05006, Republic of Korea.
  • Samia Nawaz Yousafzai
    Department of Computer Science, HITEC University Taxila, Taxila, Punjab, 47080, Pakistan.
  • Nadhem Nemri
    Department of Information Systems, College of Science and Arts at Muhayel, King Khalid University, Mahayel Aseer, Saudi Arabia.
  • Hadeel Alsolai
    Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, P.O. Box 84428, Riyadh 11671, Saudi Arabia.
  • Shouki A Ebad
    Center for Scientific Research and Entrepreneurship, Northern Border University, Arar, 73213, Saudi Arabia. shouki.abbad@nbu.edu.sa.
  • Shaymaa Sorour
    Department of Management Information Systems, School of Business, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa, 31982, Saudi Arabia.
  • Yeonghyeon Gu
    Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Sejong University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
  • Muhammad Syafrudin
    Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Sejong University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
  • Norma Latif Fitriyani
    Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Sejong University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Keywords

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