Optimized machine learning model for air quality index prediction in major cities in India

Industrial advancements and utilization of large amount of fossil fuels, vehicle pollution, and other calamities increases the Air Quality Index (AQI) of major cities in a drastic manner. Major cities AQI analysis is essential so that the government can take proper preventive, proactive measures to reduce air pollution. This research incorporates artificial intelligence in AQI prediction based on air pollution data. An optimized machine learning model which combines Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) with the Decision Tree (DT) algorithm for accurate prediction of AQI in major cities of India. Air quality data available in the Kaggle repository is used for experimentation, and major cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Visakhapatnam, and Chennai are considered for analysis. The proposed model performance is experimentally verified through metrics like R-Square, RMSE, MSE, MAE, and accuracy. Existing machine learning models, like k-nearest Neighbor, Random Forest regressor, and Support vector regressor, are compared with the proposed model. The proposed model attains better prediction performance compared to traditional machine learning algorithms with maximum accuracy of 88.98% for New Delhi city, 91.49% for Bangalore city, 94.48% for Kolkata, 97.66% for Hyderabad, 95.22% for Chennai and 97.68% for Visakhapatnam city.

Using machine learning models to predict the effects of seasonal fluxes on Plesiomonas shigelloides population density

Seasonal variations (SVs) affect the population density (PD), fate, and fitness of pathogens in environmental water resources and the public health impacts. Therefore, this study is aimed at applying machine learning intelligence (MLI) to predict the impacts of SVs on P. shigelloides population density (PDP) in the aquatic milieu. Physicochemical events (PEs) and PDP from three rivers acquired via standard microbiological and instrumental techniques across seasons were fitted to MLI algorithms (linear regression (LR), multiple linear regression (MR), random forest (RF), gradient boosted machine (GBM), neural network (NN), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), boosted regression tree (BRT), extreme gradient boosting (XGB) regression, support vector regression (SVR), decision tree regression (DTR), M5 pruned regression (M5P), artificial neural network (ANN) regression (with one 10-node hidden layer (ANN10), two 6- and 4-node hidden layers (ANN64), and two 5- and 5-node hidden layers (ANN55)), and elastic net regression (ENR)) to assess the implications of the SVs of PEs on aquatic PDP. The results showed that SVs significantly influenced PDP and PEs in the water (p < 0.0001), exhibiting a site-specific pattern. While MLI algorithms predicted PDP with differing absolute flux magnitudes for the contributing variables, DTR predicted the highest PDP value of 1.707 log unit, followed by XGB (1.637 log unit), but XGB (mean-squared-error (MSE) = 0.0025; root-mean-squared-error (RMSE) = 0.0501; R² =0.998; medium absolute deviation (MAD) = 0.0275) outperformed other models in terms of regression metrics. Temperature and total suspended solids (TSS) ranked first and second as significant factors in predicting PDP in 53.3% (8/15) and 40% (6/15), respectively, of the models, based on the RMSE loss after permutations. Additionally, season ranked third among the 7 models, and turbidity (TBS) ranked fourth at 26.7% (4/15), as the primary significant factor for predicting PDP in the aquatic milieu. The results of this investigation demonstrated that MLI predictive modelling techniques can promisingly be exploited to complement the repetitive laboratory-based monitoring of PDP and other pathogens, especially in low-resource settings, in response to seasonal fluxes and can provide insights into the potential public health risks of emerging pathogens and TSS pollution (e.g., nanoparticles and micro- and nanoplastics) in the aquatic milieu. The model outputs provide low-cost and effective early warning information to assist watershed managers and fish farmers in making appropriate decisions about water resource protection, aquaculture management, and sustainable public health protection.

Investigation of estimation performance for different soil areas

Soil plays a vital role in the climate system. This paper performs decision tree regression to estimate soil moisture (SM) by considering different parameters that include air temperature, time, relative humidity, and soil temperature. Besides, this paper investigates the effects of the parameters of decision tree regression by utilizing the response surface. The obtained estimation results of two distinct soil areas, Field and Forest, indicate that two different soil areas have distinct estimation quality. Furthermore, numerical results of the training stage show that the estimation of SM for Field and Forest soil performing decision tree regression offers 0.0019 and 0.0025 mean absolute error (MAE), respectively. Moreover, numerical results show that the interaction of the parameters of the performed algorithm plays a vital role in the estimation stage of Field and Forest soils.

Applying machine learning approaches to analyze the vulnerable road-users' crashes at statewide traffic analysis zones

INTRODUCTION

In this paper, we present machine learning techniques to analyze pedestrian and bicycle crash by developing macro-level crash prediction models.

METHODS

We collected the 2010-2012 Statewide Traffic Analysis Zone (STAZ) level crash data and developed rigorous machine learning approach (i.e., decision tree regression (DTR) models) for both pedestrian and bicycle crash counts. To our knowledge, this is the first application of DTR models in the burgeoning macro-level traffic safety literature.

RESULTS

The DTR models uncovered the most significant predictor variables for both response variables (pedestrian and bicycle crash counts) in terms of three broad categories: traffic, roadway, and socio-demographic characteristics. Additionally, spatial predictor variables of neighboring STAZs were considered along with the targeted STAZ in both DTR models. The DTR model considering spatial predictor variables (spatial DTR model) were compared without considering spatial predictor variables (aspatial DTR model) and the model comparison results discovered that the prediction accuracy of the spatial DTR model performed better than the aspatial DTR model. Finally, the current research effort contributed to the safety literature by applying some ensemble techniques (i.e. bagging, random forest, and gradient boosting) in order to improve the prediction accuracy of the DTR models (weak learner) for macro-level crash count. The study revealed that all the ensemble techniques performed slightly better than the DTR model and the gradient boosting technique outperformed other competing ensemble techniques in macro-level crash prediction models.