Research on Urban Air Quality Prediction Method Based on the Fusion of Wide-area Spatiotemporal Distribution Data

Air quality data exhibit nonlinearity, sensitivity to environmental factors, and long-term dependencies. Numerous factors influence air quality, making accurate predictions based on a single-dimensional dataset impractical. This study proposes a method for urban air quality prediction that integrates wide-area spatiotemporal data, designed to address the unique characteristics of air quality datasets. First, relevant wide-area spatiotemporal data are selected, and their correlations with air quality are systematically analyzed. Second, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network-based Transformer model is utilized to capture the long-term dependencies in the air quality sequences. Finally, the model successfully generates hourly multi-step predictions for six air pollutants. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the method that relies on air quality data alone for multi-step air quality prediction.