MS DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SYSTEM

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Browsing MS DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SYSTEM by Author "KHAWAJA HASSAN WASEEM"

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    Forecasting Air Quality and the impact of Meteorological factors on Air Quality in multiple cities of Pakistan
    (UMT, Lahore, 2021) KHAWAJA HASSAN WASEEM
    n recent years due to the rapid increase in urbanization and industrialization, the overall quality of air is taking a turn toward the worst. Clean air is necessary for leading a healthy life. Many of the respiratory illnesses have their root in the poor quality of air across the region. Due to the tremendous impact of air quality across people's life, it is extremely essential to come up with a mechanism through which the future value of air quality or its pollutant (PM 2.5, NOx, COx, SOx, etc) could be forecasted. However, forecasting of air quality and its pollutant is complicated as air quality is dependent on several different factors such as weather, vehicular and power plant emission, etc. There has been little to no research in this domain in the context of Pakistan. This thesis aim is to find the impact of weather on the PM 2.5 concentration and to forecast the Daily and Hourly PM 2.5 concentration for the next 30 days and 72 hours respectively for Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi in Pakistan. This forecasting will be done through the state of art Time series models such as SARMIAX, FbProphet, LSTM, and LSTM Encoder-Decoder, moreover, these models will also be compared against each other based on MAPE and processing speed. Through this research, we were able to determine that weather conditions such as Temperature, Precipitation, UV Index, Humidity, Pressure, Wind speed, Visibility, Dew point, and Cloud cover had a negative correlation with PM 2.5 concentration. This thesis was also able to successfully forecast the proposed daily and hourly PM 2.5 concentration. In respect to model comparison, LSTM Encoder-Decoder was found to the most accurate with a MAPE value of 28.2, 15.07, 42.1 for daily and 11.75, 9.5, 7.4 for hourly forecasting for Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi respectively. However, in respect of speed, it was also among the slowest. This proves that a data-driven approach is essential just like the knowledge-based method for the resolution of air pollution in Pakistan.