Fine-Grained Air Pollution Inference with Mobile Sensing Systems: A Weather-Related Deep Autoencoder Model

Air pollution is a global health threat. Except static official air quality stations, mobile sensing systems are deployed for urban air pollution monitoring to achieve larger sensing coverage and greater sampling granularity. However, the data sparsity and irregularity also bring great challenges for pollution map recovery. To address these problems, we propose a deep autoencoder framework based inference algorithm. Under the framework, a partially observed pollution map formed by the irregular samples are input into the model, then an encoder and a decoder work together to recover the entire pollution map. Inside the decoder, we adopt a convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) model by revealing its physical interpretation with an atmospheric dispersion model, and further present a weather-related ConvLSTM to enable quasi real-time applications.

To evaluate our algorithm, a half-year data collection was deployed with a real-world system on a coastal area including the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city in north China. With the resolution of 500 m x 500 m x 1 h, our offline method is proved to have high robustness against low sampling coverage and accidental sensor errors, obtaining 14.9% performance improvement over existing methods. Our quasi real-time model better captures the spatiotemporal dependencies in the pollution map with unevenly distributed samples than other real-time approaches, obtaining 4.2% error reduction.