Leveraging Temporal Information to Improve Machine Learning-Based Calibration Techniques for Low-Cost Air Quality Sensors

Date
2024-05-04
Authors
Ali, Sharafat
Alam, Fakhrul
Potgieter, Johan
Arif, Khalid Mahmood
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract

Low-cost ambient sensors have been identified as a promising technology for monitoring air pollution at a high spatio-temporal resolution. However, the pollutant data captured by these cost-effective sensors are less accurate than their conventional counterparts and require careful calibration to improve their accuracy and reliability. In this paper, we propose to leverage temporal information, such as the duration of time a sensor has been deployed and the time of day the reading was taken, in order to improve the calibration of low-cost sensors. This information is readily available and has so far not been utilized in the reported literature for the calibration of cost-effective ambient gas pollutant sensors. We make use of three data sets collected by research groups around the world, who gathered the data from field-deployed low-cost CO and NO2 sensors co-located with accurate reference sensors. Our investigation shows that using the temporal information as a co-variate can significantly improve the accuracy of common machine learning-based calibration techniques, such as Random Forest and Long Short-Term Memory.

Description
Keywords
0301 Analytical Chemistry , 0502 Environmental Science and Management , 0602 Ecology , 0805 Distributed Computing , 0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering , Analytical Chemistry , 3103 Ecology , 4008 Electrical engineering , 4009 Electronics, sensors and digital hardware , 4104 Environmental management , 4606 Distributed computing and systems software
Source
Sensors, ISSN: 1424-8220 (Print), MDPI, 24(9). doi: 10.3390/s24092930
Rights statement
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)