Ensemble Machine Learning Model for Accurate Air Pollution Detection Using Commercial Gas Sensors

This paper presents the results on developing an ensemble machine learning model to combine commercial gas sensors for accurate concentration detection. Commercial gas sensors have the low-cost advantage and become key components of IoT devices in atmospheric condition monitoring. However, their native coarse resolution and poor selectivity limit their performance. Thus, we adopted recurrent neural network (RNN) models to extract the time-series concentration data characteristics and improve the detection accuracy. Firstly, four types of RNN models, LSTM and GRU, Bi-LSTM, and Bi-GRU, were optimized to define the best-performance single weak models for CO, O(3), and NO(2) gases, respectively. Next, ensemble models which integrate multiple single weak models with a dynamic model were defined and trained. The testing results show that the ensemble models perform better than the single weak models. Further, a retraining procedure was proposed to make the ensemble model more flexible to adapt to environmental conditions. The significantly improved determination coefficients show that the retraining helps the ensemble models maintain long-term stable sensing performance in an atmospheric environment. The result can serve as an essential reference for the applications of IoT devices with commercial gas sensors in environment condition monitoring.