A novel encoder-decoder model based on Autoformer for air quality index prediction.

Rapid economic development has led to increasingly serious air quality problems. Accurate air quality prediction can provide technical support for air pollution prevention and treatment. In this paper, we proposed a novel encoder-decoder model named as Enhanced Autoformer (EnAutoformer) to improve the air quality index (AQI) prediction. In this model, (a) The enhanced cross-correlation (ECC) is proposed for extracting the temporal dependencies in AQI time series; (b) Combining the ECC with the cross-stage feature fusion mechanism of CSPDenseNet, the core module CSP_ECC is proposed for improving the computational efficiency of the EnAutoformer. (c) The time series decomposition and dilated causal convolution added in the decoder module are exploited to extract the finer-grained features from the original AQI data and improve the performance of the proposed model for long-term prediction. The real-world air quality datasets collected from Lanzhou are used to validate the performance of our prediction model. The experimental results show that our EnAutoformer model can greatly improve the prediction accuracy compared to the baselines and can be used as a promising alternative for complex air quality prediction.