Fine-Grained Air Quality Inference via Multi-Channel Attention Model

In this paper, we study the problem of fine-grained air quality inference that predicts the air quality level of any location from air quality readings of nearby monitoring stations. We point out the importance of explicitly modeling both static and dynamic spatial correlations, and consequently propose a novel multi-channel attention model (MCAM) that models static and dynamic spatial correlations as separate channels. The static channel combines the beauty of attention mechanisms and graph-based spatial modeling via an adapted bilateral filtering technique, which considers not only locations' Euclidean distances but also their similarity of geo-context features. The dynamic channel learns stations' time-dependent spatial influence on a target location at each time step via long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and attention mechanisms. In addition, we introduce two novel ideas, atmospheric dispersion theories and the hysteretic nature of air pollutant dispersion, to better model the dynamic spatial correlation. We also devise a multi-channel graph convolutional fusion network to effectively fuse the graph outputs, along with other features, from both channels. Our extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that MCAM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions.