Predicting air quality index using attention hybrid deep learning and quantum-inspired particle swarm optimization

Air pollution poses a significant threat to the health of the environment and human well-being. The air quality index (AQI) is an important measure of air pollution that describes the degree of air pollution and its impact on health. Therefore, accurate and reliable prediction of the AQI is critical but challenging due to the non-linearity and stochastic nature of air particles. This research aims to propose an AQI prediction hybrid deep learning model based on the Attention Convolutional Neural Networks (ACNN), Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO)-enhanced-Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and XGBoost modelling techniques. Daily air quality data were collected from the official Seoul Air registry for the period 2021 to 2022. The data were first preprocessed through the ARIMA model to capture and fit the linear part of the data and followed by a hybrid deep learning architecture developed in the pretraining–finetuning framework for the non-linear part of the data. This hybrid model first used convolution to extract the deep features of the original air quality data, and then used the QPSO to optimize the hyperparameter for LSTM network for mining the long-terms time series features, and the XGBoost model was adopted to fine-tune the final AQI prediction model. The robustness and reliability of the resulting model were assessed and compared with other widely used models and across meteorological stations. Our proposed model achieves up to 31.13% reduction in MSE, 19.03% reduction in MAE and 2% improvement in R-squared compared to the best appropriate conventional model, indicating a much stronger magnitude of relationships between predicted and actual values. The overall results show that the attentive hybrid deep Quantum inspired Particle Swarm Optimization model is more feasible and efficient in predicting air quality index at both city-wide and station-specific levels.