Reducing Pollution Health Impact with Air Quality Prediction Assisted by Mobility Data

Abstract

Countries all around the world recognise the impact of air quality on public health, advocating for city centre decarbonisation and pollutant monitoring via Internet of Things technologies. Using data collected from these systems, it is possible to generate models that predict pollution based on regular patterns where mobility data can enhance the accuracy and robustness of these advanced machine learning models. This paper follows this approach, utilising vehicle traffic data from image recognition, on-site vehicle detectors, and synthetic data to maximise prediction accuracy in various urban environments. The results reveal that this proposal improves prediction for traffic-related pollutants, such as SO2 and PM2.5 , which are linked to severe respiratory diseases. These results also highlight the role of synthetic data in enhancing prediction performance under limited datasets.