A hybrid deep learning technology for PM_2.5 air quality forecasting

The concentration of PM_2.5 is one of the main factors in evaluating the air quality in environmental science. The severe level of PM_2.5 directly affects the public health, economics and social development. Due to the strong nonlinearity and instability of the air quality, it is difficult to predict the volatile changes of PM_2.5 over time. In this paper, a hybrid deep learning model VMD-BiLSTM is constructed, which combines variational mode decomposition (VMD) and bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM), to predict PM_2.5 changes in cities in China. VMD decomposes the original PM_2.5 complex time series data into multiple sub-signal components according to the frequency domain. Then, BiLSTM is employed to predict each sub-signal component separately, which significantly improved forecasting accuracy. Through a comprehensive study with existing models, such as the EMD-based models and other VMD-based models, we justify the outperformance of the proposed VMD-BiLSTM model over all compared models. The results show that the prediction results are significantly improved with the proposed forecasting framework. And the prediction models integrating VMD are better than those integrating EMD. Among all the models integrating VMD, the proposed VMD-BiLSTM model is the most stable forecasting method.