A Combined Approach for Predicting the Distribution of Harmful Substances in the Atmosphere Based on Parameter Estimation and Machine Learning Algorithms

This paper proposes a new approach to predicting the distribution of harmful substances in the atmosphere based on the combined use of the parameter estimation technique and machine learning algorithms. The essence of the proposed approach is based on the assumption that the concentration values predicted by machine learning algorithms at observation points can be used to refine the pollutant concentration field when solving a differential equation of the convection-diffusion-reaction type. This approach reduces to minimizing an objective functional on some admissible set by choosing the atmospheric turbulence coefficient. We consider two atmospheric turbulence models and restore its unknown parameters by using the limited-memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm. Three ensemble machine learning algorithms are analyzed for the prediction of concentration values at observation points, and comparison of the predicted values with the measurement results is presented. The proposed approach has been tested on an example of two cities in the Republic of Kazakhstan. In addition, due to the lack of data on pollution sources and their intensities, an approach for identifying this information is presented.