Evaluating the performance of support vector machines based on different kernel methods for forecasting air pollutants

The alarming level of air pollution in urban centres is an urgent threat to human health. Its consequences can be measured in terms of health issues experienced by children, an increasing numbers of heart and lung diseases, and, most importantly, the number of pollution related deaths. That is why a lot of attention has recently been paid to air pollution monitoring and prediction modelling. In order to develop prediction models, the study uses Support Vector Machines (SVM) with linear, polynomial, radial base function, normalised polynomial, and Pearson VII function kernels to predict the hourly concentration of pollutants in the air. The paper analyses the monitoring dataset of air pollutants and meteorological parameters as input variable to predict the concentrations of various air pollutants. The prediction performance of the models was assessed by using evaluation metrics, namely the correlation coefficient, root mean squared error, relative absolute error, and relative root squared error. To validate the model, the accuracy of the predictive algorithm was tested against two widely and commonly applied regression approaches called multilayer perceptron and linear regression. Furthermore, back check prediction test was performed to examine the consistency of the models. According to the results, the Pearson VII function and normalised polynomial kernel yield the most accurate results in terms of the correlation coefficient and error values to predict the concentrations of atmospheric pollutants as compared to other SVM kernels and traditional prediction models.