A deep autoencoder model for pollution map recovery with mobile sensing networks

Rui Ma, Ning Liu, Xiangxiang Xu, Yue Wang, Hae Young Noh, Pei Zhang, Lin Zhang

Abstract: Air pollution is a global health threat. Nowadays, with the increasing amount of air pollution monitoring data from either conventional official stations or mobile sensing systems, the role of deep learning methods in pollution map recovery becomes gradually apparent. To address the challenges including the irregular sampling from mobile sensing and the non-interpretability of deep learning models, we proposed a deep autoencoder framework based inference algorithm. By separating the process of pollution generation and data sampling, this framework is able to deal with sampling under any irregular intervals in time and space. Also, we adopt a convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) structure to model the pollution generation after revealing its internal connections with an atmospheric dispersion model. Our algorithm is evaluated over a three-month real-world data collection in Tianjin, China. Results show our method can obtain up to 2x performance improvement over existing methods, benefited from its high robustness against different background pollution level and accidental sensor errors.