Fusion of land use regression modeling output and wireless distributed sensor network measurements into a high spatiotemporally-resolved NO2 product

A comprehensive review of the development of land use regression approaches for modeling spatiotemporal variations of ambient air pollution: A perspective from 2011 to 2023

Land use regression (LUR) models are widely used in epidemiological and environmental studies to estimate humans' exposure to air pollution within urban areas. However, the early models, developed using linear regressions and data from fixed monitoring stations and passive sampling, were primarily designed to model traditional and criteria air pollutants and had limitations in capturing high-resolution spatiotemporal variations of air pollution. Over the past decade, there has been a notable development of multi-source observations from low-cost monitors, mobile monitoring, and satellites, in conjunction with the integration of advanced statistical methods and spatially and temporally dynamic predictors, which have facilitated significant expansion and advancement of LUR approaches. This paper reviews and synthesizes the recent advances in LUR approaches from the perspectives of the changes in air quality data acquisition, novel predictor variables, advances in model-developing approaches, improvements in validation methods, model transferability, and modeling software as reported in 155 LUR studies published between 2011 and 2023. We demonstrate that these developments have enabled LUR models to be developed for larger study areas and encompass a wider range of criteria and unregulated air pollutants. LUR models in the conventional spatial structure have been complemented by more complex spatiotemporal structures. Compared with linear models, advanced statistical methods yield better predictions when handling data with complex relationships and interactions. Finally, this study explores new developments, identifies potential pathways for further breakthroughs in LUR methodologies, and proposes future research directions. In this context, LUR approaches have the potential to make a significant contribution to future efforts to model the patterns of long- and short-term exposure of urban populations to air pollution.

Multisensor Estimation Fusion on Statistical Manifold

In the paper, we characterize local estimates from multiple distributed sensors as posterior probability densities, which are assumed to belong to a common parametric family. Adopting the information-geometric viewpoint, we consider such family as a Riemannian manifold endowed with the Fisher metric, and then formulate the fused density as an informative barycenter through minimizing the sum of its geodesic distances to all local posterior densities. Under the assumption of multivariate elliptical distribution (MED), two fusion methods are developed by using the minimal Manhattan distance instead of the geodesic distance on the manifold of MEDs, which both have the same mean estimation fusion, but different covariance estimation fusions. One obtains the fused covariance estimate by a robust fixed point iterative algorithm with theoretical convergence, and the other provides an explicit expression for the fused covariance estimate. At different heavy-tailed levels, the fusion results of two local estimates for a static target display that the two methods achieve a better approximate of the informative barycenter than some existing fusion methods. An application to distributed estimation fusion for dynamic systems with heavy-tailed process and observation noises is provided to demonstrate the performance of the two proposed fusion algorithms.