Enhancing PM_2.5 Prediction Using NARX-Based Combined CNN and LSTM Hybrid Model

In a world where humanity’s interests come first, the environment is flooded with pollutants produced by humans’ urgent need for expansion. Air pollution and climate change are side effects of humans’ inconsiderate intervention. Particulate matter of 2.5 µm diameter (PM2.5) infiltrates lungs and hearts, causing many respiratory system diseases. Innovation in air pollution prediction is a must to protect the environment and its habitants, including those of humans. For that purpose, an enhanced method for PM2.5 prediction within the next hour is introduced in this research work using nonlinear autoregression with exogenous input (NARX) model hosting a convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. The proposed enhancement was evaluated by several metrics such as index of agreement (IA) and normalized root mean square error (NRMSE). The results indicated that the CNN–LSTM/NARX hybrid model has the lowest NRMSE and the best IA, surpassing the state-of-the-art proposed hybrid deep-learning algorithms.