ARTICLE IN PRESS

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 20 (2007) 745–755

www.elsevier.com/locate/engappai

Forecasting of the daily meteorological pollution using wavelets and

support vector machine
Stanislaw Osowskia,b,, Konrad Garantya
a
Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
b
Military University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
Received 14 July 2006; received in revised form 23 October 2006; accepted 27 October 2006
Available online 29 December 2006

Abstract

The paper presents the method of daily air pollution forecasting by using support vector machine (SVM) and wavelet decomposition.
Based on the observed data of NO2, CO, SO2 and dust, for the past years and actual meteorological parameters, like wind, temperature,
humidity and pressure, we propose the forecasting approach, applying the neural network of SVM type, working in the regression mode.
To obtain the acceptable accuracy of forecast we decompose the measured time series data into wavelet representation and predict the
wavelet coefficients. On the basis of these predicted values the final forecasting is prepared. The paper presents the results of numerical
experiments on the basis of the measurements made by the meteorological stations, situated in the northern region of Poland.
r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Pollution forecasting; Support vector machine; Wavelet decomposition; Neural network predictors; Generalization ability

1. Introduction years (Comrie and Diem, 1999; Boznar et al., 2004;

The information of the meteorological pollution, such as
CO, NO2, SO2 and dust is more and more important due to
their harmful effects on human health (Comrie and Diem,
1999). It is especially true in the urban environment of
every country. The automatic measurements of the
concentration of these pollutants provide the instant
registration, on the basis of which the averaged values
are usually calculated. The important problem is early
prediction of the harmful pollution just to inform or alarm
the local inhabitants of the incoming danger.
The aim of this research work is to construct a
forecasting model for the averaged next day pollution that
would be applicable for the use by the authority
responsible for air pollution regulation in the appropriate
region of the country. The use of the artificial neural
networks (Haykin, 1999) of multilayer perceptron (MLP)
type as the model of pollution was exploited frequently last
Corresponding author. Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw,
Poland.
E-mail address: sto@iem.pw.edu.pl (S. Osowski).
Hooyberghs et al., 2005; Kukkonen et al., 2003; Bianchini
et al., 1989). We propose here the forecasting system based
on the support vector machine (SVM) and the wavelet
decomposition of the time series, formed on the basis of the
signals measured in the previous days. The prediction
system makes use of such meteorological quantities as
speed and direction of the wind, temperature, humidity, air
pressure, season of the year, type of the day and also the
daily pollution measured in the previous days. We build the
SVM networks for the prediction of each considered
pollutant (CO, NO2 and SO2 and dust). The forecasting
system based directly on these measurements was not able
to provide the acceptable accuracy of prediction. To solve
the problem we decompose the measured signals into
wavelets (Mallat, 1989; Daubechics, 1988). The prediction
is performed for the wavelet coefficients (the detailed
coefficients up to some level and the approximated coarse
signal corresponding to the last level) in the original
resolution. On the basis of these predicted values the
reconstruction of the real value of the forecasted pollution
for all considered pollutants is performed by simply
summing up the predicted decomposition signals.

0952-1976/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.engappai.2006.10.008
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
746 S. Osowski, K. Garanty / Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 20 (2007) 745–755
The obtained system based on the application of SVM
networks and wavelet decomposition represents very good
generalization ability. Trained on one type of pollutant
(NO2) it is able to predict the other pollutant concentra-
tions (CO, SO2, dust) with the satisfactory accuracy. The
numerical experiments of forecasting have been performed
for the northern region of Poland (the meteorological
stations near Gdansk). The results of experiments have
confirmed good accuracy of daily prediction for all
considered pollutants. These detailed results will be
presented and discussed in the paper.
2. Problem analysis
The problem of monitoring and early warning of
alarming values of the pollution in a region is an important
task of any agency monitoring the quality of the
environment. The typical values measured by the meteor-
ological stations include the concentrations of SO2, NO2,
CO, dust, etc. The network of measuring stations are
owned and maintained by the environmental agency of the
state and the measurements are performed according to the
regulations of this agency. Typically the instantaneous
values are registered and on the basis of them the
appropriate averaged values are determined. The day
averaged values are of practical use, since they represent
some long term tendencies of the pollution development.
For meteorologists they establish the satisfactory tool for
observing trends of pollution, and enable to warn the local
population of alarming values, as well as to undertake
some preventive actions for the future.
Fig. 1. The real time series of NO2 concentration for the year 2003 averaged a day for one chosen station in northern region of Poland.
Fig. 1 presents the daily averaged time series of NO2
concentration for the whole year 2003 measured by one of
the meteorological stations of northern region of Poland.
There is a visible large variety of the concentration of the
pollutant from the day to day. At the mean value of 15.53
mg/m3 the standard deviation of the measured values was
equal 7.99 mg/m3. The large value of the standard deviation
confirms the difficulty of the forecasting problem.
The meteorological stations measure also some addi-
tional parameters such as the temperature, direction and
strength of the wind, humidity, pressure, etc. These
parameters are associated with the pollution, although this
association is of rather complex nature. Fig. 2 presents the
exemplary relationships between the temperature and dust
(Fig. 2a), and the temperature and NO2 concentration
(Fig. 2b). As it is seen the distribution of the measured
points is far from linear and represents the complex
relation. Plotting the distribution of other pollutants versus
the temperature, wind, humidity or pressure, no clear
relationship can be observed as well. It means that the
prediction of these quantities needs an application of
highly complicated nonlinear model of these dependencies.
A bit better correlation is observed among the concen-
trations of different pollutants. Fig. 3 presents the
measured dependencies between the concentration of SO2
and NO2 (Fig. 3a) and between NO2 and dust (Fig. 3b).
These correlations are closer to the linear, although even
here the scattering of points is also wide. The standard
deviations of the distance between the real distribution
of points and their linear approximation are equal 1.92
[mg/m3] for the relationship between NO2 and SO2 (Fig. 3a)
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S. Osowski, K. Garanty / Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 20 (2007) 745–755 747

Fig. 2. The measured dependence between the temperature and the concentration of (a) dust and (b) NO2 for one chosen station in northern region of
Poland.

Fig. 3. The measured relationship between the concentrations of NO2 and SO2 (a) and NO2 and dust (b) for one chosen station in northern region of
Poland.

and 1.98 [mg/m3] for the relationship between NO2 and dust
(Fig. 3b).
The important conclusion from these results is that there
are some similarities existing among the mechanisms of
spreading different pollutants. The observed increase of NO2
pollution results in the increase of the concentration of the
other types of pollutants, although the observed relationship
is not linear one. The interesting challenge is to construct and
learn the model of one kind of pollution and using this model
to predict the data corresponding to the other pollutant.
3. The tools and methods of pollution prediction
In our work we will apply the SVM of the Gaussian
kernel, working in the regression mode (Vapnik, 1998;
Schölkopf and Smola, 2002) as the model of pollution. This
choice was accepted after trying other neural type solutions,
like MLP and neuro-fuzzy structure (Haykin, 1999; Jang et
al., 1997). The main advantage of the SVM over MLP or
neuro-fuzzy network is its good generalization ability,
acquired at relatively small number of learning data and
at large number of input nodes (high dimensional problem).
Due to very specific problem formulation the learning task
is simplified to the solution of the quadratic problem of a
single minimum point (global minimum). To obtain better
accuracy of prediction we have applied also the wavelet
decomposition (Mallat, 1989; Daubechier, 1988) of the time
series of the measured concentrations of pollutants corre-
sponding to the whole year. Instead of predicting the total
concentration of the particular pollutant we build few SVM
networks responsible for prediction of the wavelet coeffi-
cients on different levels, forming the partial representations
of the particular pollutant concentration. Reconstruction of
the final concentration of the pollutant is done on the basis
of the predicted wavelet coefficients using simple operation
of summing.
3.1. Support vector machine for regression
SVM, the solution of the universal feedforward net-
works, is known as the excellent tool for the classification
and regression problems of good generalization ability
(Vapnik, 1998; Schölkopf and Smola, 2002). In distinction
to the classical neural networks, the formulation of the
learning problem of SVM leads to the quadratic program-
ming with linear constraints.
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The SVM is a linear machine of one output y(x),
working in the high dimensional feature space formed by
the nonlinear mapping of the N-dimensional input vector x
into a K-dimensional feature space (K4N) through the use
of the nonlinear function jðxÞ. The number of hidden units
(K) is equal to the number of so-called support vectors,
that are the learning data points, closest to the separating
hyperplane. The learning task is transformed to the
minimization of the error function, while keeping the
weights of the network at minimum. The error function is
defined through the so-called e-insensitive loss function
L ðd; yðxÞÞ (Vapnik, 1998):
(
jd  yðxÞj   for jd  yðxÞjX;
L ðd; yðxÞÞ ¼ (1)
0 for jd  yðxÞjo;
where e is the assumed accuracy, d is the destination, x the
input vector and y(x) the actual output of the network
under excitation of x and the actual output signal of the
SVM network is defined by
X
K
yðxÞ ¼ wj jj ðxÞ þ b ¼ wT uðxÞ þ b,
j¼1
where w ¼ ½w1 ; . . . ; wK T is the weight vector, b the bias and
uðxÞ ¼ ½j1 ðxÞ; . . . ; jK ðxÞT the basis function vector.
The solution of the so defined optimization problem is
solved by the introduction of the Lagrangian function and
the Lagrange multipliers ai , a0i ði ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; pÞ responsible
for the functional constraints defined by (1). The mini-
mization of the Lagrangian function has been transformed
The most important is the choice of coefficients e and C.
Constant e determines the margin within which the error is
neglected. The smaller its value the higher accuracy of
learning is required, and more support vectors will be
found by the algorithm. The regularization constant C is
the weight, determining the balance between the complex-
ity of the network, characterized by the weight vector w
and the error of approximation, measured by the slack
variables and the value of e. For the normalized input
signals the value of e is usually adjusted in the range
(103–102), and C is much bigger than 1.
3.2. Wavelet decomposition of signals
The discrete wavelet transform belongs to the multi-
resolution analysis (Mallat, 1989; Daubechies, 1988). It is a
linear transformation with a special property of time and
frequency localization at the same time. It decomposes the
given signal series onto a set of basis functions of different
frequencies, shifted each other and called wavelets. Unlike
the discrete Fourier transform the discrete wavelet transform
(2)
is not a single object. In reality, it hides a whole family of
transformations. The individual members of the family are
determined by the choice of so-called mother wavelet
function. The goal of discrete wavelet transform is to
decompose arbitrary signal f(t) into a finite summation of
wavelets at different scales (levels) according to the expansion
XX
f ðtÞ ¼ cjk cð2j t  kÞ, (6)
j k

to the so-called dual problem (Vapnik, 1998; Platt, 1998): where cjk is a new set of coefficients and cð2j t  kÞ is the
( wavelet of jth level (scale) shifted by k samples. The set of
Xp Xp
max d i ðai  a0i Þ   ðai  a0i Þ wavelets of different scales and shifts can be generated from
i¼1 i¼1 the single prototype wavelet, called mother wavelet, by
)
1XX
p p dilations and shifts. What makes the wavelet bases interesting
 ðai  a0i Þðaj  a0j ÞKðxi ; xj Þ ð3Þ is their self-similarity: every function in wavelet basis is a
2 i¼1 j¼1
dilated and shifted version of one (or possibly few) mother
at the constraints functions. In practice the most often used are the orthogonal
or bio-orthogonal wavelets, for which the set of wavelets
X
p
forms an orthogonal or bi-orthogonal base (Mallat, 1989;
ðai  a0i Þ ¼ 0,
i¼1
Daubechies, 1988).
Let us denote the discrete form of the original signal
0pai pC; 0pa0i pC, ð4Þ
vector by f and by Aj f the operator that computes the
where Kðxi ; xj Þ ¼ uT ðxi Þuðxj Þ is an inner-product kernel approximation of f at resolution 2j. Let Dj f denotes the
defined in accordance with the Mercer’s theorem (Vapnik, detailed signal, Dj f ¼ Ajþ1 f  Aj f at the resolution 2j. It
1998) for the learning data set x. After solving the dual was shown by Mallat (1989) that both operations Aj f and
problem all weights are expressed through the Nsv nonzero Dj f can be interpreted as the convolution of the signal of
Lagrange multipliers ai , a0i and the same number of previous resolution and the finite impulse response of the
learning vectors xi associated with them. The network quadrature mirror filters: the high pass (G) ~ of coefficients g~
output signal y(x) can be then expressed in the form: ~
and the low pass (H) of coefficients h ~

X
N sv X
1
Aj f ¼ ~
hð2n  kÞAjþ1 fð2nÞ, (7)
yðxÞ ¼ ðai  a0i ÞKðx; xi Þ þ b. (5)
i¼1 k¼1

The most known kernel functions used in practice are X

1
radial (Gaussian), polynomial, spline or even sigmoidal Dj f ¼ ~
gð2n  kÞAJþ1 fð2nÞ. (8)
functions (Vapnik, 1998; Schölkopf and Smola, 2002). k¼1
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These operations performed for values of j, from 1 to J,
deliver the coefficients of the decomposition at different
levels (scales) and different resolutions of the original
vector f and form the analysis of the signal. The most often
used discrete wavelet analysis scheme uses Mallat pyramid
algorithm (Mallat, 1989).
As a result of such transformation we get the set of
coefficients representing the detailed signals Dj at different
levels jðj ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; JÞ, and the residue signal AJ f at the
level J. All of them are of different resolutions, appropriate
to the level. The coefficients of Djf can be interpreted as the
high frequency details, that distinguish the approximation
of f at two subsequent levels of resolution. On the other
hand, the signal AJf represents the coarse approximation of
the vector f.
The next step is the transformation of the detailed signals
Djf ðj ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; JÞ and the coarse approximation signals
AJf into the original resolution. It is done by using special
filters G and H associated with the analysis filters G~ and H~
by the quadrature and reflection relationships (Mallat,
1989). This is so-called reverse Mallat pyramid algorithm,
forming the reconstruction of the original signal. As a
result we get the decomposed signals of each level in the
original resolution. The recovery of the original signal f(n)
in each time instant n is then performed by simply adding
the appropriate wavelet coefficients and the coarse
approximation. At J-level decomposition we have
f ðnÞ ¼ D1 ðnÞ þ D2 ðnÞ þ    þ DJ ðnÞ þ AJ ðnÞ.
Fig. 4 presents the results of 5-level wavelet decomposition
of the real data of NO2 concentrations (see Fig. 1), of the
whole year 2003, obtained by using Matlab (1997)
platform. The Daubechies wavelets Db8 have been applied
in the decomposition. All signals (the first five levels of
wavelet coefficients from D1 to D5 and the coarse
approximation A5 on the fifth level) are illustrated in the
original resolution. We observe the substantial difference
of variability of the signals at different levels. The higher is
the wavelet level, the lower variation of the coefficients and
easier prediction of them.
Our main idea is to substitute the prediction task of the
original time series of high variability by the prediction of
its wavelet coefficients on different levels of lower
variabilities, and then using Eq. (9) for final forecasting
of the pollution at any time point n. Since most of the
wavelet coefficients are of lower variability we expect the
increase of the total prediction accuracy.
The important point in designing the prediction system is
decision what the optimal value of J is. At higher J the
variability of larger number of predicted signals is lower, so
their prediction is easier and hence the expected accuracy
higher. However, at too high number of levels the total
error associated with the increased number of terms under
prediction begins to dominate and as a result the total
accuracy deteriorates. In our solution, we have determined
the value of J on the basis of the standard deviation of the
approximated signals AJf. We stop the decomposition on
749
the level for which the standard deviation of the
approximated signal is substantially smaller than that of
the original signal. In practice, the stopping condition has
been expressed in the empirical form:
stdðAJ fÞ
o0:1. (10)
stdðfÞ
For the data distribution presented in Fig. 4 the value J ¼
5 was appropriate, since the ratio stdðA 5 fÞ
stdðfÞ ¼ 0:067 satisfies
relation (10).
3.3. The prediction method
The forecasting of the pollution is done for the next day
on the basis of the information of the past pollution data
from the last few days and the measured or predicted
meteorological parameters, such as the speed and direction
of the wind, the temperature, humidity, pressure, and the
actual information of the month (from 1 to 12) as well as
the type of the day within the week (from 1 to 7).
The meteorological parameters listed above are well-
known factors influencing the pollution (Comrie and Diem,
1999; Boznar et al., 2004; Hooyberghs et al., 2005;
Kukkonen et al., 2003). All of them are available from
the actual measurements performed by the meteorological
stations. The type of the day influences the pollution in an
evident way, since the industrial activity (the important
(9)
source of pollution) is concentrated mainly in the working
days. The season of the year is also strictly connected with
the state of environment due to the enlarged demand of
power in the winter or reduced activity of industry in the
summer holiday.
The consideration of the past pollution is justifiable by
the continuity of the process of formation of the actual
pollution. The significant question is how many past days
should be taken into account. To solve this problem we
have applied the correlation analysis of the actual pollution
with the pollution of few past days. Table 1 presents the
exemplary results of the correlation analysis for CO, NO2,
SO2 and dust for the period of one year in the form of the
correlation coefficient for the data measured by one chosen
meteorological station situated in northern Poland. The
actual day (d) presented in the table was Saturday and the
previous days: Friday (d1) Thursday (d2), Wednesday
(d3) and Tuesday (d4).
We have analyzed many examples of such dependencies
for different days of the week and noticed significant
correlations for at most two neighboring days. At the
number of days exceeding two the correlations were usually
either weak or changing significantly (from small to
medium) for different days. So only past two days data
have been used in the prediction model.
All data have been normalized linearly to the range from
0 to 1 by simply dividing the real value by the maximum
one of the appropriate set. For the prediction of the
wavelet coefficients on different levels for the next day we
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Fig. 4. The wavelet decomposition of the measured time series corresponding to NO2 concentration of the year 2003; D1 to D5 represent the detailed
coefficients and A5 the coarse approximation of the time on fifth level.

Table 1
The correlation coefficient values of the actual concentration of CO, NO2,
SO2 and dust with the past four days for one chosen meteorological
station

Previous days d1 d2 d3 d4

CO 0.97 0.90 0.79 0.64

NO2 0.95 0.82 0.76 0.69
SO2 0.95 0.83 0.80 0.75
Dust 0.94 0.82 0.78 0.77

have applied the SVM approach. After analysis of

variability of the coarse approximation data at different
level decompositions (see Eq. (7)) we have decided to
apply five levels ðJ ¼ 5Þ. Prediction of wavelet coefficients
on each level requires to use one SVM network. The
additional one is needed for prediction of the coarse
approximation of the data. It means the application of six
SVM networks altogether. Fig. 5 presents the exemplary
general SVM structure used for prediction of the wavelet
coefficients Dpi ðd þ 1Þ for i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; 5 of the particular
pollutant p on ith level for the next (d+1) day. Identical
structure is used for the prediction of the coarse
approximation Ap5 of the pollutant p (CO, NO2, SO2
and dust).
Fig. 5. The structure of the SVM network used for prediction of any
detailed coefficient Dpi and the coarse approximation Api for pth
pollutant.
The input data of the network is formed by five
meteorological parameters (the speed of the wind, direction
of the wind, temperature, humidity, pressure), the succeed-
ing number of the month and the week day, and also two
past values of the forecasted quantities corresponding to
two last days. To provide the appropriate representation of
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the wind, we have applied its strength and direction

combined together in the form x and y components
(rectangular system) of its speed vector (two nodes in
representation of x). It makes together nine inputs and the
same number of normalized input signals. All data used in
learning has been transformed to the original resolution on
each level using reverse Mallat filtering. The learning
vectors x were formed from the components of this data
base of the year 2001 and 2002 and the corresponding
meteorological parameters for these days. The destination
was associated with the predicted value of the appropriate
wavelet coefficient for the next day.
Two kinds of experiments have been performed. In the
first one, the SVM networks were specialized for prediction
of the wavelet coefficients on the appropriate decomposi-
tion levels for the next day for each pollutant separately. At
five decomposition levels and four pollutants it means
training 24 independent SVM networks. After phase of
learning all parameters of SVM networks were frozen and
the networks were tested on the data of the same kind of
pollutant (not used in learning phase).
In the second type of experiments, we have learned the Fig. 6. The geographical location of the meteorological stations in
SVM networks on the data related to one pollutant only northern region of Poland.
(for example NO2) and the trained networks tested on the
data of all pollutants (NO2, CO, SO2 and dust). It means 2003 year. We denote by d and y the 365 (the year)
training only six SVM networks. Assuming that the component vectors of the average daily concentration of
mechanisms of creating different type pollutions are the the particular pollutant (CO, NO2, SO2 or dust) corre-
same, the generalization ability of the trained SVM sponding to the destination vector d (the real measure-
networks should be sufficient for predicting the concentra- ments) and the vector y actually generated by our SVM
tions of the considered pollutants. system. We have defined two kinds of errors.
In the testing mode we supply the appropriate values
forming the vector x to the trained SVM networks that  The mean absolute error
predict the wavelet coefficients of all five levels and the !
coarse approximation value (all in the normal resolution) 1 X N
MAE ¼ jd i  yi j , (11)
for the next day. On the basis of these predicted coefficients N i¼1
the real prediction of the concentration of the particular where N is the number of days under prediction.
pollutant for the next day is made by simply adding them,  The relative (normalized) error
as is shown by Eq. (9).
kd  yk
¼ . (12)
4. The results of numerical experiments kdk

The numerical experiments of predicting the next day
average pollution have been performed for the network of
seven meteorological stations in the northern region of
Poland near Gdansk, belonging to the ARMAAG
foundation. Fig. 6 presents the geographical location of
these stations.
Some of the stations are situated in different points of
the city of Gdansk and two outside the real center. The
data taking part in learning and testing have been collected
within three years, from 2001 to 2003. Part of them (the
years 2001 and 2002) has been used for learning and the
other part (the year 2003) for testing only.
The results of learning and testing have been assessed on
the basis of the mean absolute errors and the average
relative error of the real concentrations and their estimated
values produced by our predicting system for the whole
The main experiments have been performed by using SVM
predictor. For the comparison purposes some experiments
have been repeated by application of the classical MLP.
The introductory experiments have been performed for
prediction of the whole pollutant without any previous
decomposition. However, the results were not encouraging.
Although the learning was possible with the acceptable
error, the testing error was far too large (lack of general-
ization ability). This was the main reason why we have
proposed the additional step of decomposing the data into
the wavelets, and used the SVM networks for predicting
the wavelet coefficients of each decomposition level. Five
level decompositions of Daubechies wavelets Db8 have
been applied. In the prediction step instead of one SVM
network to predict particular pollutant concentration we
have to use 6 networks responsible for predicting five levels
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of wavelet coefficients and the coarse approximation
signal. On the basis of these predicted values the whole
pollutant concentrations for the next day have been
reconstructed by applying Eq. (9). In all experiments, we
have used the general scheme of SVM network shown in
Fig. 5 of the Gaussian kernel Kðx; xi Þ ¼ expðkx
xi k2 =2s2 Þ. For the normalized data samples we have used
s ¼ 1 and the tolerance value  ¼ 0:01. The regularization
constant C was chosen after series of experiments using the
standard validation approach (C ¼ 100).
The most important observation from these experiments
is, that we have got very good generalization abilities of the
SVM networks, trained on the data related to NO2 only.
The networks trained on one type of pollution data were
able to predict the concentration of the other pollutants
(SO2, CO2, dust) with practically the same accuracy as the
specialized networks, trained for each pollutant separately.
It confirms the fact that the mechanism of creating
different type pollutions is similar and the neural networks
are able to learn such mechanism.
All presented numerical results will be related to this
generalization ability of SVM networks. We limit pre-
sentation of the results to the testing data only, not taking
part in learning (the data of the year 2003).
Fig. 7(a–d) depicts the exemplary results of prediction of
NO2, CO, dust and SO2 concentrations corresponding to

Fig. 7. The exemplary results of daily prediction of the time series of CO (a), dust (b), SO2 (c) and NO2 (d) for one chosen meteorological station (the
upper plots—the real and predicted concentrations, the lower ones—the prediction errors).
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Fig. 7. (Continued)

one chosen station, compared to the real measured values.
The upper plots present both patterns (the real and
predicted) while the lower one—the distribution of the
prediction errors. The predictions coincide very well with
the real measured data. The mean of prediction errors is
close to zero (0.19 [mg/m3] for dust, 1.2 [mg/m3] for CO,
0.094 [mg/m3] for NO2 and 0.023 [mg/m3] for SO2). The
mean of absolute errors is 4.88 [mg/m3] for the dust, 27.77
[mg/m3] for CO, 1.59 [mg/m3] for NO2 and 1.13 [mg/m3] for
SO2. The standard deviation of errors for the dust is equal
5.97 [mg/m3], 49.7 [mg/m3] for CO, 2.27 [mg/m3] for NO2
and 1.97 [mg/m3] for SO2. If we compare these values to the
real concentrations of the dust (the average level of 70 [mg/
m3]), CO (average level of 500 [mg/m3]), NO2 (average level
of 16 [mg/m3]) and SO2 (the average value of 18 [mg/m3]) it
is seen that the relative errors for all pollutants are close to
each other.
Table 2 presents the mean absolute error of prediction of
CO, NO2, SO2 and dust for all seven stations. Comparing
these values with the average levels of the real concentra-
tion of the pollutants shows that their relative values are
relatively small and stay on a similar level for all pollutants.
Table 3 presents the details of the average relative
prediction errors for all considered pollutants at seven
stations. All of them have been obtained using SVM
networks trained on the data of NO2 only.
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Table 2 To assess the quality of SVM predictor we have

The mean absolute error MAE of daily predictions of all pollutants for compared it with the solution based on MLP. Table 4
seven stations in the year 2003 obtained by using SVM
presents the comparison of the average relative errors of
Pollutant CO (mg/m3) NO2 (mg/m3) SO2 (mg/m3) Dust (mg/m3) the daily NO2 forecasting in the year 2003 for seven
stations by applying the SVM and MLP approaches. The
Station 1 31.26 2.11 0.94 5.86 average error eSVM corresponds to the SVM and the eMLP
Station 2 27.77 1.59 1.13 4.88
to MLP approach. There is a significant difference of
Station 3 22.94 2.06 0.99 3.17
Station 4 31.96 1.78 1.40 3.59 results. The average errors at SVM approach (14.74%) is
Station 5 36.54 3.41 0.98 5.96 much lower than that obtained at MLP application
Station 6 52.66 2.62 1.45 4.62 (21.71%). Evidently the MLP is of much worse general-
Station 7 30.56 2.16 1.41 3.83 ization ability. Observe that the same data has been used
for learning and testing both networks. The optimal
structure of MLP was found 9-17-1 (188 weights). At
available 730 training data pairs (two years used in
Table 3 learning) the number of data points was not satisfactory
The average relative errors eSVM of the daily predictions of all pollutants and as a result the acquired generalization ability of MLP
for seven stations in the year 2003 obtained by using SVM was not good enough and this was the main reason of its
Pollutant CO (%) NO2 (%) SO2 (%) Dust (%) inferior testing performance. On the other side the
relatively small number of learning pairs was not a problem
Station 1 13.37 15.22 18.19 21.53 for SVM, since this network is relatively insensitive to the
Station 2 10.10 14.10 18.14 18.66
limited number of learning data.
Station 3 7.15 15.18 18.16 13.71
Station 4 11.37 13.00 16.55 13.70 Fig. 8 presents the details of performance of both
Station 5 10.47 13.97 16.34 13.99 predictors of NO2 for 13 succeeding days compared to the
Station 6 14.03 17.41 17.79 13.11 real values (destination). It is evident that the results of
Station 7 9.76 14.39 15.83 14.16 SVM are much closer to the destination (solid line) than
Average for 10.86 14.74 17.28 15.55
that generated by MLP.
all stations
The interesting is also the comparison of the proposed
approach with the other recent solutions presented in the
works devoted to the prediction of pollution. Unfortu-
Table 4 nately the data under prediction are different in each case,
The average relative errors of prediction of the daily NO2 concentration since no standard base is available in internet. The paper
for seven different stations in the year 2003 obtained by SVM and MLP (Peace et al., 2005) has presented the results of predicting
predictors
the carbon concentration in the north–west of Italy using
Stations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 the site-optimized semi-empirical air pollution model. The
MAE error given for each season of the year was changing
eMLP (%) 21.03 22.06 22.64 18.55 19.80 27.01 20.97
eSVM (%) 15.22 14.10 15.18 13.00 13.97 17.41 14.39
from 127 [mg/m3] to 510 [mg/m3], while the average level of

The presented numerical results confirm that the

accuracy of prediction of all pollutants stay on a similar
level (the average relative error for all stations—below or
close to 15%) although the testing data were related to the
pollutants not used in learning. This is very interesting
phenomenon of the proposed system of prediction,
following from the principle of operation of the neural
networks. In the stage of learning by using training data,
the SVM predictor was learned the mechanism of creation
of the pollution and not the data points themselves!
Satisfactory results of testing the trained network on
different pollutants simply show that the mechanism of
formation of different pollutions are really similar. Good
generalization ability of SVM acquired in the learning
stage was sufficient to obtain the satisfactory results of
forecasting for all pollutants. The obtained accuracy of
prediction makes this method practical for the one day Fig. 8. The details of tracing the destination values of NO2 concentration
ahead prediction. (solid line) by SVM (dash line) and MLP (dash-dot line) predictors.
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
S. Osowski, K. Garanty / Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 20 (2007) 745–755
pollution under observation was around 1000 [mg/m3] (the
normalized relative error from 12.7% to 51%). In our case
the average MAE error of prediction of CO concentration
for all seven stations over the whole year was 33.38 [mg/m3]
at the average level of pollution approximately 500 [mg/m3]
(the normalized relative error around 7%).
The paper (Bianchini et al., 2006) has proposed and
compared two methods of predicting NO2 concentration:
the AutoRegressive eXogenous (ARX) model and a
cyclostationary neural network (CNN) model applying
the MLP network. The results have been obtained for
the data gathered by the agency ARPA, Lombardia in
northern Italy. The MAE error computed for 12 months
was almost 5 [mg/m3] (the CNN model) and 20 [mg/m3] (the
ARX model). The peak errors of prediction were 35 [mg/
m3] (CNN) and 60 [mg/m3] (ARX), respectively. Our results
of NO2 prediction were as following: 2.24 [mg/m3] (MAE)
and 8 [mg/m3] (the peak error). This comparison shows the
significant advantage of applying the wavelet decomposi-
tion and the SVM predictors proposed in this paper.
5. Conclusions
The paper has presented the prediction method of the
daily atmospheric pollution by applying the support vector
machine and wavelet decomposition. The important point
of this approach is the decomposition of the daily data into
the wavelets and individual prediction of wavelets at
different levels. Application of SVM instead of classical
MLP has enabled to obtain much better accuracy of
prediction of the wavelet coefficients and as a result also of
the whole pollutant concentration.
The proposed approach has been tested on the data of
the meteorological stations situated in northern Poland.
The obtained results of prediction are in good agreement
with the actual measurements made at these stations,
irrespective of the type of pollutant. The important
observation from these experiments is very good general-
ization ability of the applied predicting system. The SVM
networks trained on the data related to only one pollutant
(NO2) measured at one chosen station, were capable of
755
producing good quality predictions for the other types of
pollutants (CO, SO2, dust) at all stations.
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