13.7LGMar 26
Interpretable PM2.5 Forecasting for Urban Air Quality: A Comparative Study of Operational Time-Series ModelsMoazzam Umer Gondal, Hamad ul Qudous, Asma Ahmad Farhan et al.
Accurate short-term air-quality forecasting is essential for public health protection and urban management, yet many recent forecasting frameworks rely on complex, data-intensive, and computationally demanding models. This study investigates whether lightweight and interpretable forecasting approaches can provide competitive performance for hourly PM2.5 prediction in Beijing, China. Using multi-year pollutant and meteorological time-series data, we developed a leakage-aware forecasting workflow that combined chronological data partitioning, preprocessing, feature selection, and exogenous-driver modeling under the Perfect Prognosis setting. Three forecasting families were evaluated: SARIMAX, Facebook Prophet, and NeuralProphet. To assess practical deployment behavior, the models were tested under two adaptive regimes: weekly walk-forward refitting and frozen forecasting with online residual correction. Results showed clear differences in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. Under walk-forward refitting, Facebook Prophet achieved the strongest completed performance, with an MAE of $37.61$ and an RMSE of $50.10$, while also requiring substantially less execution time than NeuralProphet. In the frozen-model regime, online residual correction improved Facebook Prophet and SARIMAX, with corrected SARIMAX yielding the lowest overall error (MAE $32.50$; RMSE $46.85$). NeuralProphet remained less accurate and less stable across both regimes, and residual correction did not improve its forecasts. Notably, corrected Facebook Prophet reached nearly the same error as its walk-forward counterpart while reducing runtime from $15$ min $21.91$ sec to $46.60$ sec. These findings show that lightweight additive forecasting strategies can remain highly competitive for urban air-quality prediction, offering a practical balance between accuracy, interpretability, ...
LGDec 9, 2025
Beyond the Hype: Comparing Lightweight and Deep Learning Models for Air Quality ForecastingMoazzam Umer Gondal, Hamad ul Qudous, Asma Ahmad Farhan
Accurate forecasting of urban air pollution is essential for protecting public health and guiding mitigation policies. While Deep Learning (DL) and hybrid pipelines dominate recent research, their complexity and limited interpretability hinder operational use. This study investigates whether lightweight additive models -- Facebook Prophet (FBP) and NeuralProphet (NP) -- can deliver competitive forecasts for particulate matter (PM$_{2.5}$, PM$_{10}$) in Beijing, China. Using multi-year pollutant and meteorological data, we applied systematic feature selection (correlation, mutual information, mRMR), leakage-safe scaling, and chronological data splits. Both models were trained with pollutant and precursor regressors, with NP additionally leveraging lagged dependencies. For context, two machine learning baselines (LSTM, LightGBM) and one traditional statistical model (SARIMAX) were also implemented. Performance was evaluated on a 7-day holdout using MAE, RMSE, and $R^2$. Results show that FBP consistently outperformed NP, SARIMAX, and the learning-based baselines, achieving test $R^2$ above 0.94 for both pollutants. These findings demonstrate that interpretable additive models remain competitive with both traditional and complex approaches, offering a practical balance of accuracy, transparency, and ease of deployment.
CVNov 24, 2025
From Pixels to Posts: Retrieval-Augmented Fashion Captioning and Hashtag GenerationMoazzam Umer Gondal, Hamad Ul Qudous, Daniya Siddiqui et al.
This paper introduces the retrieval-augmented framework for automatic fashion caption and hashtag generation, combining multi-garment detection, attribute reasoning, and Large Language Model (LLM) prompting. The system aims to produce visually grounded, descriptive, and stylistically interesting text for fashion imagery, overcoming the limitations of end-to-end captioners that have problems with attribute fidelity and domain generalization. The pipeline combines a YOLO-based detector for multi-garment localization, k-means clustering for dominant color extraction, and a CLIP-FAISS retrieval module for fabric and gender attribute inference based on a structured product index. These attributes, together with retrieved style examples, create a factual evidence pack that is used to guide an LLM to generate human-like captions and contextually rich hashtags. A fine-tuned BLIP model is used as a supervised baseline model for comparison. Experimental results show that the YOLO detector is able to obtain a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.71 for nine categories of garments. The RAG-LLM pipeline generates expressive attribute-aligned captions and achieves mean attribute coverage of 0.80 with full coverage at the 50% threshold in hashtag generation, whereas BLIP gives higher lexical overlap and lower generalization. The retrieval-augmented approach exhibits better factual grounding, less hallucination, and great potential for scalable deployment in various clothing domains. These results demonstrate the use of retrieval-augmented generation as an effective and interpretable paradigm for automated and visually grounded fashion content generation.