Prediction of Multi-Site PM_2.5 Concentrations in Beijing Using CNN-Bi LSTM with CBAM

Air pollution is a growing problem and poses a challenge to people’s healthy lives. Accurate prediction of air pollutant concentrations is considered the key to air pollution warning and management. In this paper, a novel PM2.5 concentration prediction model, CBAM-CNN-Bi LSTM, is constructed by deep learning techniques based on the principles related to spatial big data. This model consists of the convolutional block attention module (CBAM), the convolutional neural network (CNN), and the bi-directional long short-term memory neural network (Bi LSTM). CBAM is applied to the extraction of feature relationships between pollutant data and meteorological data and assists in deeply obtaining the spatial distribution characteristics of PM2.5 concentrations. As the output layer, Bi LSTM obtains the variation pattern of PM2.5 concentrations from spatial data, overcomes the problem of long-term dependence on PM2.5 concentrations, and achieves the task of accurately forecasting PM2.5 concentrations at multiple sites. Based on real datasets, we perform an experimental evaluation and the results show that, in comparison to other models, CBAM-CNN-Bi LSTM improves the accuracy of PM2.5 concentration prediction. For the prediction tasks from 1 to 12 h, our proposed prediction model performs well. For the 13 to 48 h prediction task, the CBAM-CNN-Bi LSTM also achieves satisfactory results