An Attention-Based Air Quality Forecasting Method

Air pollution is threatening human's health since the industrial revolution, but there are not efficient ways to solve air pollution, so forecasting air quality has become an efficient measure to prevent citizens from hurting of heavy air pollution. In this paper, we proposed an advanced Seq2Seq (Sequence to Sequence) model called attention-based air quality forecasting model (ABAFM) whose RNN encoder is replaced by pure attention mechanism with position embedding. This improvement not only reduces the training time of Seq2Seq model with attention but also enhances the robustness of Seq2Seq models. We implemented ABAFM in Olympic center and Dongsi monitoring stations in Beijing to forecast PM2.5 in future 24 hours. The experimental results showed that the proposed model outperformed the related arts, especially in sudden changes.