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Machine learning for air quality prediction and data analysis: Review on recent advancements, challenges, and outlooks

2025· review· en· W4414679246 on OpenAlexafffund
Manal Karmoude, Brenton Munhungewarwa, Isaiah Chiraira, Ryan Peter Mckenzie, Jude Dzevela Kong, Bevan I. Smith, Gelan Ayana, Nkosiphendule Njara, Thuso Mathaha, M. Kumar, B. R. Mellado Garcia

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Science of The Total Environment · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAir Quality Monitoring and Forecasting
Canadian institutionsPublic Health Ontario
FundersInternational Development Research CentreNational Research FoundationUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
KeywordsAir quality indexAnomaly detectionCluster analysisGradient boostingRandom forestReinforcement learningInterpretabilityConvolutional neural network

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Air quality is a critical determinant of human health, with severe consequences resulting from air pollution. The growing necessity for air quality monitoring has led to the adoption of IoT sensor networks, which provide real-time data for forecasting, issuing warnings, and informing public health interventions. In this context, machine learning (ML) algorithms have proven to be powerful tools for enhancing air quality prediction and addressing monitoring challenges. However, a comprehensive review compiling the research space of ML for air quality is seldom available. This review analyzes over 70 recent studies that apply ML techniques to air quality monitoring, categorizing them based on the type of learning approach employed, with a focus on identifying the most effective algorithms in each category. The findings demonstrate that ensemble models such as Random Forest (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) consistently achieve high accuracy in structured datasets, while deep learning (DL) approaches like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) excel in capturing temporal dependencies and spatial patterns in pollution forecasting. Unsupervised approaches like clustering and anomaly detection effectively enhance data quality and sensor calibration, whereas reinforcement learning shows promise in adaptive control scenarios, despite challenges related to computational intensity and interpretability. This review is highly significant, offering valuable insights for policymakers and researchers in developing strategies to mitigate air pollution and improve public health using advanced ML techniques.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.012

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.004
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.002
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.117
GPT teacher head0.357
Teacher spread0.239 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations30
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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