Multi-Group Encoder-Decoder Networks to Fuse Heterogeneous Data for Next-Day Air Quality Prediction

Accurate next-day air quality prediction is essential to enable warning and prevention measures for cities and individuals to cope with potential air pollution, such as vehicle restriction, factory shutdown, and limiting outdoor activities. The problem is challenging because air quality is affected by a diverse set of complex factors. There has been prior work on short-term (e.g., next 6 hours) prediction, however, there is limited research on modeling local weather influences or fusing heterogeneous data for next-day air quality prediction. This paper tackles this problem through three key contributions: (1) we leverage multi-source data, especially high-frequency grid-based weather data, to model air pollutant dynamics at station-level; (2) we add convolution operators on grid weather data to capture the impacts of various weather parameters on air pollutant variations; and (3) we automatically group (cross-domain) features based on their correlations, and propose multi-group Encoder-Decoder networks (MGED-Net) to effectively fuse multiple feature groups for next-day air quality prediction. The experiments with real-world data demonstrate the improved prediction performance of MGED-Net over state-of-the-art solutions (4.2% to 9.6% improvement in MAE and 9.2% to 16.4% improvement in RMSE).