Estimation of ground-level O3 using soft computing techniques: case study of Amritsar, Punjab State, India

Over the years, many organizations across the globe have conducted various studies pertaining to air pollution and its ill effects. The results of these studies substantially conclude that a plethora of people succumbs to the adversities caused by the ever-increasing air pollutants. In this investigation, M5P, random forest (RF)- and Gaussian process (GP)-based approaches are used to predict the tropospheric ozone for Amritsar, Punjab state of India, metropolitan area. The models proposed were based on ten input parameters viz. particulate matter PM2.5, particulate matter PM10, sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), nitric oxide (NO), ammonia (NH3), temperature (T), solar radiation (SR), wind direction (WD) and wind speed (WS), while the tropospheric ozone (O-3) was an output parameter. Three most popular statistical parameters such as correlation coefficient (CC), mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) were used for the assessment of the developed models. In comparison, it was found that better results were achieved with random forest-based model with CC value as 0.8850, MAE value as 0.0593 and RMSE value as 0.0772 for testing stage. The suggested models are expected to save cost of instrument, cost of labour work, time and contribute to greater accuracy. A result of sensitivity investigation concludes that the solar radiation is the most influencing parameter in estimating the actual values of O-3 based on the current data set.