The used of the Boosted Regression Tree Optimization Technique to Analyse an Air Pollution data.

Abstract

The stochastic boosted regression trees (BRT) technique has the capability to quantify and explain the relationships between explanatory variables. We applied this machine learning modelling technique to derive the relationships between the gases air pollutants, meteorological conditions and time system variables of particulate matter (PM10) concentrations. In order to get lowest prediction error and to avoid over-fitting, the parameters of the BRT model need to be tuned. In this experiment, 25 BRT models were generated from 14 years’ worth of hourly data (122,736 a one hour averaged data from January 2000 to December 2013 gathered from four Continuous Automated Air Quality Monitoring Stations in peninsular Malaysia (located in Klang, Selangor (CA0011), Perai, Penang (CA0003), Kota Bharu, Kelantan (CA0022) and Kemaman, Terengganu (CA0002)). Seventy percent of the data were used for training and 30 percent for validation of the models. An experiment was conducted to determine the best iteration that could model hourly PM10 concentrations by optimizing the BRT parameter which are learning rate (lr), tree complexity (tc) and number of trees (nt). Five different lr (0.001, 0.005, 0.01, 0.05 and 0.1) were tested with different tree complexities (1 to 20) in the BRT model development process. From the experiment, the combination of lr = 0.05 and tc = 5 for the training set for the BRT model achieved the lowest root mean squared error (RMSE) compared to the other tested combinations. It was also found that the number of trees increased with the increment in the number of samples. A high coefficient of determinant (R2 ) value (0.90) for the linear relationship between the number of samples and nt was found for all the four stations. The optimum number of trees for the model was estimated by using 10-fold cross-validation. It was found that the best number of iterations for Klang, Perai, Kota Bahru and Kemaman were 12,327, 32,987, 16,370 and 57,634, respectively. The prediction accuracy of the model was tested by using the fraction of prediction namely a factor of two (FAC2), mean bias, mean gross error, RMSE, correlation coefficient (R), and index of agreement (IOA). The prediction performance of the final BRT model based on the R value was 0.81, 0.78, 0.85 and 0.81 for for Perai, Kemaman, Klang and Kota Bahru, respectively, which indicates that the BRT model developed and applicability of this can be used in other atmospheric environment data.

Comparative analysis of machine learning techniques for so2 prediction modelling

“…The data collection period lasted from 2002 to 2017. Klang has a high level of air pollution when compared to other cities in Peninsular Malaysia [10]. Random selection of 80% for training and another 20% for validate the model.…”

Coupling of quantile regression into boosted regression trees (BRT) technique in forecasting emission model of PM10 concentration

“…It is therefore possible to determine, rank and describe the relationship between variables (Yahaya et al 2019). The BRT is also capable of handling various types of inputs (i.e.…”