A dual-path dynamic directed graph convolutional network for air quality prediction

Accurate air quality prediction can help cope with air pollution and improve the life quality. With the development of the deployments of low-cost air quality sensors, increasing data related to air quality has provided chances to find out more accurate prediction methods. Air quality is affected by many external factors such as the position, wind, meteorological information, and so on. Meanwhile, these factors are spatio-temporal dynamic and there are many dynamic contextual relationships between them. Many methods for air quality prediction do not consider these complex spatio-temporal correlations and dynamic contextual relationships. In this paper, we propose a dual-path dynamic directed graph convolutional network (DP-DDGCN) for air quality prediction. We first create a dual-path transposed dynamic directed graph according to static distance relationships of stations and the dynamic relationships generated by wind speed and directions. Then based on the dual-path dynamic directed graph, we can capture the dynamic spatial dependencies more comprehensively. After that we apply gated recurrent units (GRUs) and add the future meteorological features, to extract the complex temporal dependencies of historical air quality data. Using dual-path dynamic directed graph blocks and the GRUs, we finally construct a dynamic spatio-temporal gated recurrent block to capture the dynamic spatio-temporal contextual correlations. Based on real-world datasets, which record a large amount of PM2.5 concentration data, we compare the proposed model with the benchmark models. The experimental results show that our proposed model has the best performance in predicting the PM2.5 concentrations.