Learning Adaptive Probabilistic Models for Uncertainty-Aware Air Pollution Prediction

Abstract

The air pollution problem has been a serious issue for public health and city development in recent years, which rises an urgent demand for accurate air pollution prediction models. Traditional time series prediction scheme has been challenged in such case because the air pollution signals can be highly dynamic and uncertain. Distinct latent physical processes and complex environment changes over time make it hard for one fixed model to give consistently good performance. Also probabilistic prediction and uncertainty-aware estimation are critical when the model is used for public decisions in practice. However, few previous works can simultaneously provide adaptive and probabilistic air pollution prediction abilities, which are important practical issues for the real-world implementation of data-driven air pollution prediction models. In this paper we propose an adversarial meta learning approach to address these concerns. After reformulating the target signals as a collection of independent but similar mini-tasks along time, we adversarially learn a meta model that includes an implicit generator to adaptively give more informative probabilistic predictions across tasks. We further provide a bayesian meta learning interpretation that recasts the proposed model as an approximate minimizer for the Wasserstein distance between a generative latent model and the true data distribution. Our model provides an algorithm that explicitly models how the prediction distribution is conditioned on underlying data patterns and simultaneously gives adaptive uncertainty estimation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world air pollution datasets show that the proposed model can simultaneously provide better probabilistic and adaptive prediction while keeping stratifying point prediction error.INDEX TERMS Air pollution prediction, meta learning, probabilistic forecast, adversarial networks.

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