A dual attention-based fusion network for long- and short-term multivariate vehicle exhaust emission prediction

The increasing number of vehicles is one main cause of atmospheric environment pollution problems. Timely and accurate long- and short-term (LST) prediction of the on-road vehicle exhaust emission could contribute to atmospheric pollution prevention, public health protection, and government decision-making for environmental management. Vehicle exhaust emission has strong non-stationary and nonlinear characteristics due to the inherent randomness and imbalance nature of meteorological factors and traffic flow. Therefore accurate LST vehicle exhaust emission prediction encounters many challenges, such as the LST temporal dependencies and complicated nonlinear correlation on various emission gases, including carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbon (HC), and nitric oxide (NO), and external influence factors. To resolve these challenging issues, we propose a novel hybrid deep learning framework, namely Dual Attention-based Fusion Network (DAFNet), to effectively predict LST multivariate vehicle exhaust emission with the temporal convolutional network, convolutional neural network, long short term memory (LSTM)-skip based on recurrent neural network, dual attention mechanism, and autoregressive decomposition model. The proposed DAFNet consists of three major parts: 1) a nonlinear component to effectively capture the dynamic LST temporal dependency of multivariate gas by the temporal convolutional network, convolutional neural network, and LSTM-skip. Moreover, the above two networks employ an attention mechanism to model the internal relevance of the LST temporal patterns and multivariate gas, respectively. 2) a linear component to tackle the scale-insensitive problem of the neural network model by an autoregressive decomposition model. 3) the external components are taken to compensate the impact of external factors on vehicle exhaust emission by the multilayer perceptron model. Finally, the proposed DAFNet is evaluated on two real-world vehicle emission datasets in Zibo and Hefei, China. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DAFNet is a powerful tool to provide highly accurate prediction for LST multivariate vehicle exhaust emission in the field of vehicle environmental management.