Prediction of Air Quality Index Using Machine Learning Techniques: A Comparative Analysis

An index for reporting air quality is called the air quality index (AQI). It measures the impact of air pollution on a person’s health over a short period of time. The purpose of the AQI is to educate the public on the negative health effects of local air pollution. The amount of air pollution in Indian cities has significantly increased. There are several ways to create a mathematical formula to determine the air quality index. Numerous studies have found a link between air pollution exposure and adverse health impacts in the population. Data mining techniques are one of the most interesting approaches to forecast AQI and analyze it. The aim of this paper is to find the most effective way for AQI prediction to assist in climate control. The most effective method can be improved upon to find the most optimal solution. Hence, the work in this paper involves intensive research and the addition of novel techniques such as SMOTE to make sure that the best possible solution to the air quality problem is obtained. Another important goal is to demonstrate and display the exact metrics involved in our work in such a way that it is educational and insightful and hence provides proper comparisons and assists future researchers. In the proposed work, three distinct methods—support vector regression (SVR), random forest regression (RFR), and CatBoost regression (CR)—have been utilized to determine the AQI of New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Hyderabad. After comparing the results of imbalanced datasets, it was found that random forest regression provides the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) values in Bangalore (0.5674), Kolkata (0.1403), and Hyderabad (0.3826), as well as higher accuracy compared to SVR and CatBoost regression for Kolkata (90.9700%) and Hyderabad (78.3672%), while CatBoost regression provides the lowest RMSE value in New Delhi (0.2792) and the highest accuracy is obtained for New Delhi (79.8622%) and Bangalore (68.6860%). Regarding the dataset that was subjected to the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) algorithm, it is noted that random forest regression provides the lowest RMSE values in Kolkata (0.0988) and Hyderabad (0.0628) and higher accuracies are obtained for Kolkata (93.7438%) and Hyderabad (97.6080%) in comparison to SVR and CatBoost regression, whereas CatBoost regression provides the highest accuracies for New Delhi (85.0847%) and Bangalore (90.3071%). This demonstrated definitely that datasets that had the SMOTE algorithm applied to them produced a higher accuracy. The novelty of this paper lies in the fact that the best regression models have been picked through thorough research by analyzing their accuracies. Moreover, unlike most related papers, dataset balancing is carried out through SMOTE. Moreover, all of the implementations have been documented via graphs and metrics, which clearly show the contrast in results and help show what actually caused the improvement in accuracy.