Development and machine learning-based calibration of low-cost multiparametric stations for the measurement of CO₂...

The pressing issue of atmospheric pollution has prompted the exploration of affordable methods for measuring and monitoring air contaminants as complementary techniques to standard methods, able to produce high-density data in time and space. The main challenge of this low-cost approach regards the in-field accuracy and reliability of the sensors. This study presents the development of low-cost stations for high-time resolution measurements of CO₂ and CH₄ concentrations calibrated via an in-field machine learning-based method. The calibration models were built based on measurements parallelly performed with the low-cost sensors and a CRDS analyzer for CO₂ and CH₄ as reference instrument, accounting for air temperature and relative humidity as external variables. To ensure versatility across locations, diversified datasets were collected, consisting of measurements performed in various environments and seasons. The calibration models, trained with 70 % for modeling, 15 % for validation, and 15 % for testing, demonstrated robustness with CO₂ and CH₄ predictions achieving R² values from 0.8781 to 0.9827 and 0.7312 to 0.9410, and mean absolute errors ranging from 3.76 to 1.95 ppm and 0.03 to 0.01 ppm, for CO₂ and CH₄, respectively. These promising results pave the way for extending these stations to monitor additional air contaminants, like PM, NO_x, and CO through the same calibration process, integrating them with remote data transmission modules to facilitate real-time access, control, and processing for end-users.