An ensemble LSTM-based AQI forecasting model with decomposition-reconstruction technique via CEEMDAN and fuzzy entropy

Air quality affects people’s daily life. Air quality index (AQI) is an essential indicator for controlling air pollution and ensuring public health, whose accurate forecasting can provide timely air pollution warnings and remind people to take protective measures against air pollution in advance. To address this issue, this paper developed a new ensemble learning model for AQI forecasting. In this study, (1) the signal decomposition technique complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) is introduced to decompose the nonlinear and nonstationary AQI history data series into several more regular and more stable subseries firstly. (2) Fuzzy entropy (FE) is selected as the feature indicator to recombine the subseries with similar trends to avoid the problem of over-decomposition and reduce the computing time. (3) An ensemble long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is established to forecast each reconstructed subseries, whose values are superimposed to predict the AQI value eventually. To validate the predicting performance of the proposed model, daily AQI data of Wuhan, China, dating from January 1, 2019, to February 28, 2022, is used as the experiment case. And comparative analysis is made between the proposed model and other common-used forecasting models. Benchmarking results of the numerical study demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to the other forecasting models with better AQI prediction accuracy.