Airvlc: An Application for Real-Time Forecasting Urban Air Pollution

Lidia Contreras Ochando, Cristina I. Font Julián, Francisco Contreras Ochando, Cèsar Ferri Ramirez

Abstract: This paper presents Airvlc, an application for producing real-time urban air pollution forecasts for the city of Valencia in Spain. Although many cities provide air quality data, in many cases, this information is presented with significant delays (three hours for the city of Valencia) and it is limited to the area where the measurement stations are located. The application employs regression models able to predict the levels of four different pollutants (CO, NO, PM2.5, NO2) in three different locations of the city. These models are trained using features that represent traffic intensity, persistence of pollutants and meteorological parameters such as wind speed and temperature. We compare different learning techniques to get the better performance in the prediction of pollutants. According to our experiments, ensembles of decision trees (Random Forest) outperforms the rest of methods in almost all of our tests. Airvlc incorporates the best regression models and, by a distance-weighted combination of the predictions, is able to generate a real-time pollution map of the city of Valencia. The application also includes a warning system for sending notifications to users when a nearby risk pollution concentration is detected.