Industrial developments and consumption of massive amount of fossil fuels, vehicle pollution, and other calamities upsurges the AQI (Air Quality Index) of major cities in a drastic manner. Owing to these factors, it is important to take proactive measures for reducing the air pollution in order to avoid life- threatening consequence. Therefore, prediction of air quality is significant for improving the health of living beings as highly polluted regions have a higher concentration of pollutants mixed in the air, affecting the respiratory system and reducing the lifetime. To control pollution, AQI is used as a measure for estimating the pollutant content in the air. Even though many existing techniques have predicted AQI, enhancement is required in prediction algorithms with minimized loss. To address the challenges in traditional algorithms, the proposed smart cities-based AQI prediction intends to utilize the proposed regression algorithm in the dataset, namely Air- Quality-Data, which collected harmful pollutants on an hourly and daily basis from multiple cities in India between 2015 to 2020. To achieve prediction efficiency with reduced loss, pre-processing of input data is being performed using Deep GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). It performs the imputation of data in place of missing values to improve accurate prediction. Additionally, feature scaling normalizes independent real-data features to a fixed scale. With the processed data, regression is done through modified Stacked Attention GRU with KL divergence, which predicts Ernakulam, Chennai and Ahmedabad cities with higher, medium, and low levels of AQI in India. The performance of the proposed regression algorithm is measured using metrics such as MAE (Mean Absolute Error), MSE (Mean Square Error), R2 (Coefficient of determination), MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error), and RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) and better MAE, MSE, R2, MAPE and RMSE obtained by the model is 0.1013, 0.0134, 0.9479, 0.1152 and 0.1156. Internal assessment and comparative analysis performed with existing regression algorithms exhibit lower loss values obtained from the present research, which determines the efficacy of the proposed model.
