Forecasting the Concentration of Particulate Matter in the Seoul Metropolitan Area Using a Gaussian Process Model

Recently, the population of Seoul has been affected by particulate matter in the atmosphere. This problem can be addressed by developing an elaborate forecasting model to estimate the concentration of fine dust in the metropolitan area. We present a forecasting model of the fine dust concentration with an extended range of input variables, compared to existing models. The model takes inputs from holistic perspectives such as topographical features on the surface, chemical sources of the fine dusts, traffic and the human activities in sub-areas, and meteorological data such as wind, temperature, and humidity, of fine dust. Our model was evaluated by the index-of-agreement (IOA) and the root mean-squared error (RMSE) in predicting PM2.5 and PM10 over three subsequent days. Our model variations consist of linear regressions, ARIMA, and Gaussian process regressions (GPR). The GPR showed the best performance in terms of IOA that is over 0.6 in the three-day predictions.