Design of a Spark Big Data Framework for PM_2.5 Air Pollution Forecasting

In recent years, with rapid economic development, air pollution has become extremely serious, causing many negative effects on health, environment and medical costs. PM_2.5 is one of the main components of air pollution. Therefore, it is necessary to know the PM_2.5 air quality in advance for health. Many studies on air quality are based on the government's official air quality monitoring stations, which cannot be widely deployed due to high cost constraints. Furthermore, the update frequency of government monitoring stations is once an hour, and it is hard to capture short-term PM_2.5 concentration peaks with little warning. Nevertheless, dealing with short-term data with many stations, the volume of data is huge and is calculated, analyzed and predicted in a complex way. This alleviates the high computational requirements of the original predictor, thus making Spark suitable for the considered problem. This study proposes a PM_2.5 instant prediction architecture based on the Spark big data framework to handle the huge data from the LASS community. The Spark big data framework proposed in this study is divided into three modules. It collects real time PM_2.5 data and performs ensemble learning through three machine learning algorithms (Linear Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree) to predict the PM_2.5 concentration value in the next 30 to 180 min with accompanying visualization graph. The experimental results show that our proposed Spark big data ensemble prediction model in next 30-min prediction has the best performance (R² up to 0.96), and the ensemble model has better performance than any single machine learning model. Taiwan has been suffering from a situation of relatively poor air pollution quality for a long time. Air pollutant monitoring data from LASS community can provide a wide broader monitoring, however the data is large and difficult to integrate or analyze. The proposed Spark big data framework system can provide short-term PM_2.5 forecasts and help the decision-maker to take proper action immediately.