On the Data Analysis of Participatory Air Pollution Monitoring Using Low-cost Sensors

Participatory sensing leverages population density and involves citizens in the collection of extensive data in multiple fields such as air pollution monitoring, enabling large-scale deployments and improving the knowledge of air quality. This study highlights the potential of low-cost sensors through a data analysis of pollutant concentrations collected during multiple sensing campaigns we co-organized using a participatory sensing platform we designed. We first compare the estimation quality of four statistical models and investigate the impact of sampling frequency on the quality of estimation and energy consumption of the nodes using an energy model based on the sensing duty cycle. In addition, we evaluate the capacity of regression models to recover missing data of one sensor based on the other sensors. Results are satisfactory and reveal that a small decrease in the sampling frequency slightly reduces the estimation quality, but in contrast, allows the nodes to operate on a longer period.