A hybrid CNN-LSTM model for predicting PM2.5 in Beijing based on spatiotemporal correlation

Long-term exposure to air environments full of suspended particles, especially PM 2.5 , would seriously damage people's health and life (i.e., respiratory diseases and lung cancers). Therefore, accurate PM 2.5 prediction is important for the government authorities to take preventive measures. In this paper, the advantages of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) models are combined. Then a hybrid CNN-LSTM model is proposed to predict the daily PM 2.5 concentration in Beijing based on spatiotemporal correlation. Specifically, a Pearson's correlation coefficient is adopted to measure the relationship between PM 2.5 in Beijing and air pollutants in its surrounding cities. In the hybrid CNN-LSTM model, the CNN model is used to learn spatial features, while the LSTM model is used to extract the temporal information. In order to evaluate the proposed model, three evaluation indexes are introduced, including root mean square error, mean absolute percent error, and R-squared. As a result, the hybrid CNN-LSTM model achieves the best performance compared with the Multilayer perceptron model (MLP) and LSTM. Moreover, the prediction accuracy of the proposed model considering spatiotemporal correlation outperforms the same model without spatiotemporal correlation. Therefore, the hybrid CNN-LSTM model can be adopted for PM 2.5 concentration prediction.