CAP: Causal Air Quality Index Prediction Under Interference with Unmeasured Confounding

A significant challenge in air quality index (AQI) prediction is to accurately evaluate the potential outcomes after conducting interventions in pollutant factors such as industrial emissions for each enterprise. Existed methods often suffer from spurious correlations caused by unmeasured confounders and are lack of interpretability of the model, leading to sub-optimal prediction performance. This motivates us to propose a causal AQI prediction framework (CAP) that employs a structural causal model (SCM) to characterize the causal structural variability of various AQI factors for robust AQI prediction. Specifically, we employ the front-door adjustment to explicitly eliminate unmeasured confounders by intervening in industrial emissions from the target enterprise. Meanwhile, we take industrial emissions of neighboring enterprises into account when intervening in the target enterprise and simulate the dispersion of industrial emissions through a Gaussian plume model based on meteorological factors. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our model on AQI prediction compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.