Managing Large Dataset Gaps in Urban Air Quality Prediction: DCU-Insight-AQ at MediaEval 2022
This work addresses urban air quality prediction gaps for environmental monitoring, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific competition dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting Air Quality Index (AQI) up to 7 days ahead when sensors are offline, using multimodal data including AQI, weather, and traffic images, achieving prediction accuracy under such scenarios as part of the MediaEval 2022 task.
Calculating an Air Quality Index (AQI) typically uses data streams from air quality sensors deployed at fixed locations and the calculation is a real time process. If one or a number of sensors are broken or offline, then the real time AQI value cannot be computed. Estimating AQI values for some point in the future is a predictive process and uses historical AQI values to train and build models. In this work we focus on gap filling in air quality data where the task is to predict the AQI at 1, 5 and 7 days into the future. The scenario is where one or a number of air, weather and traffic sensors are offline and explores prediction accuracy under such situations. The work is part of the MediaEval'2022 Urban Air: Urban Life and Air Pollution task submitted by the DCU-Insight-AQ team and uses multimodal and crossmodal data consisting of AQI, weather and CCTV traffic images for air pollution prediction.