A hybrid model for daily air quality index prediction and its performance in the face of impact effect of COVID-19 lockdown

Accurate and dependable air quality forecasting is critical to environmental and human health. However, most methods usually aim to improve overall prediction accuracy but neglect the accuracy for unexpected incidents. In this study, a hybrid model was developed for air quality index (AQI) forecasting, and its performance during COVID-19 lockdown was analyzed. Specifically, the variational mode decomposition (VMD) was employed to decompose the original AQI sequence into some subsequences with the parameters optimized by the Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and the residual sequence was further decomposed by the complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN). On this basis, a deep learning method bidirectional long short-term memory coupled with added time filter layer and attention mechanism (TFA-BiLSTM) was employed to explore the latent dynamic characteristics of each subsequence. This WOA-VMD-CEEMDAN-TFA-BiLSTM hybrid model was used to forecast AQI values for four cities in China, and results verified that the accuracy of the hybrid model outperformed other proposed models, achieving R(2) values of 0.96–0.97. In addition, the improvement in MAE (34.71–49.65%) and RMSE (32.82–48.07%) were observed over single decomposition-based model. Notably, during the epidemic lockdown period, the hybrid model had significant superiority over other proposed models for AQI prediction.