Hybrid machine learning model for hourly ozone concentrations prediction and exposure risk assessment

With the development and improvement of optimization algorithms, machine learning models have become more important in air quality prediction. These models can be used to address problems associated with atmospheric environmental pollutants like ozone and facilitate the development of appropriate control policies. Firstly, the data sets of meteorological and pollution in Nanjing and four nearby cities from 2018 to 2021 were divided into four sections to build mixed models. The extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm was improved by the permutation importance method (PIM) and Pearson correlation coefficient to acquire the most important features of the seasonal model and analysis of the effect on ozone prediction. The results reflect that the NO2, PM2.5, and PM10 parameters have an important influence, accounting for an average of 23% of prediction, and the average influence of the meteorological parameters of the solar radiation exceeds 11%. Secondly, the particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), and ant lion optimizer (ALO) algorithms were used to optimize the SVR model parameters to predict hourly ozone concentration in January, April, July, and September 2022. The R2 values are 0.95, 0.92, 0.85, and 0.84, respectively, and the RMSE values are 5.2, 12.4, 18.0 and 16.6 μg/m3, respectively. Finally, the impact of hourly ozone concentration on population health was studied by a risk assessment of the population density-weighted pollution exposure. The result shows that the influence on humans gradually decreased yearly from 2018 to 2021, the average variation from 2.6% to −1.1%, and health risks during the evening rush hours are still prevalent and require further attention. •The hybrid machine learning model was used to select features on ozone prediction.•Three optimization algorithms were used to improve model performance.•Hourly ozone concentrations on human health from 2018 to 2021.