Air quality prediction for Chengdu based on long short-term memory neural network with improved jellyfish search optimizer

Air quality prediction plays an important role in preventing air pollution and improving living environment. For this prediction, many indicators can be employed to reflect the air quality, among which air quality index (AQI) is the most commonly used. However, existing methods are relatively simple and the corresponding prediction accuracy needs to be improved. Particularly, the prediction accuracy is affected by the parameter selection of methods, and the corresponding optimization problems are usually non-convex and multi-modal. Therefore, based on long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network with improved jellyfish search optimizer (IJSO), a novel hybrid model denoted by IJSO-LSTM is proposed to predict AQI for Chengdu. In order to evaluate the optimizing ability of IJSO, other variants of jellyfish search optimizer as well as other state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms are applied to optimize the hyperparameters of LSTM neural network for comparison, and the results confirm that IJSO is more suitable for optimizing LSTM neural network. In addition, compared with other well-known models, the results demonstrate IJSO-LSTM has higher prediction accuracy with root-mean-square error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error controlling below 4, 3, and 4%, respectively.