LASSO and attention-TCN: a concurrent method for indoor particulate matter prediction

Long time exposure to indoor air pollution environments can increase the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory system damage. Most previous studies focus on outdoor air quality, while few studies on indoor air quality. Current neural network-based methods for indoor air quality prediction ignore the optimization of input variables, process input features serially, and still suffer from loss of information during model training, which may lead to the problems of memory-intensive, time-consuming and low-precision. We present a novel concurrent indoor PM prediction model based on the fusion model of Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and an Attention Temporal Convolutional Network (ATCN), together called LATCN. First, a LASSO regression algorithm is used to select features from PM1, PM2.5, PM10 and PM (>10) datasets and environmental factors to optimize the inputs for indoor PM prediction model. Then an Attention Mechanism (AM) is applied to reduce the redundant temporal information to extract key features in inputs. Finally, a TCN is used to forecast indoor particulate concentration in parallel with inputting the extracted features, and it reduces information loss by residual connections. The results show that the main environmental factors affecting indoor PM concentration are the indoor heat index, indoor wind chill, wet bulb temperature and relative humidity. Comparing with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) approaches, LATCN systematically reduced the prediction error rate (19.7% ~ 28.1% for the NAE, and 16.4% ~ 21.5% for the RMSE) and improved the model running speed (30.4% ~ 81.2%) over these classical sequence prediction models. Our study can inform the active prevention of indoor air pollution, and provides a theoretical basis for indoor environmental standards, while laying the foundations for developing novel air pollution prevention equipment in the future.