Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473

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Environmental Pollution
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envpol

Forecasting PM2.5 using hybrid graph convolution-based model

considering dynamic wind-field to offer the benefit of spatial
interpretability*
Hongye Zhou a, Feng Zhang a, b, *, Zhenhong Du a, b, Renyi Liu a, b, c
a
School of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China
b
Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science, Hangzhou, 310028, China
c
Ocean Academy, Zhejiang University, Zhoushan, 316021, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Air pollution is a complex process and is affected by meteorological conditions and other chemical
Received 19 November 2020 components. Numerous studies have demonstrated that data-driven spatio-temporal prediction models
Accepted 6 January 2021 of PM2.5 concentration are comparable with the model-driven model. However, data-driven models are
Available online 19 January 2021
usually depending on the statistical correlation between PM2.5 and other factors and have challenges in
dealing with causality in complex systems. In this paper, we argue that domain knowledge should be
Keywords:
incorporated into data-driven models to enhance prediction accuracy and make the model more phys-
PM2.5 concentration forecast
ically realistic. We focus on the influence of dynamic wind-field on PM2.5 concentration distribution and
Domain knowledge
Dynamic wind-field
fuse the pollution diffusion distance with the deep learning model based on a wind-field surface. In order
Graph convolution network to model spatial dependence between monitoring stations, which is dynamic and anisotropic because of
Temporal convolution network the wind-field, we proposed a hybrid deep learning framework, dynamic directed spatio-temporal graph
convolution networks (DD-STGCN). It expanded the ability to deal with space-time prediction in the
continuous and dynamic wind-field. We used a directed graph time-series to describe the vertex state
and topological relationship between vertices and replaced traditional Euclidean distance with wind-
field diffusion distance to describe the proximity relationship between vertices. Our experiment re-
sults demonstrated that the DD-STGCN model achieved a better prediction ability than LSTM, GC-LSTM,
and STGCN models. Compared to the best comparison model, MAPE, MAE, and RMSE were improved by
10.2%, 9.7%, and 9.6% in 12 h on an average, respectively. The performance of our model was further
tested during a haze period. In the case that two models both considered the effect of wind, compared
with the pure data-driven model, our model performed better in prediction distribution and showed the
benefit of spatial interpretability provided by domain knowledge.
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction infant mortality (Heft-Neal et al., 2018). With the increasing

PM2.5 (atmospheric particles with aerodynamic diameters less
than or equal to 2.5 mm) is the main component of the hazy episode.
Exposure to ambient PM2.5 can have detrimental acute and chronic
health effects, including cardiac and pulmonary disease (Leclercq
et al., 2018; Hamra et al., 2014; Hoek et al., 2013), detrimental ef-
fects on birth outcomes (Sun et al., 2020; Brauer et al., 2008), and
* the spatial distribution of pollutant in various scales, represented
This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Prof. Pavlos Kassomenos.
* Corresponding author. School of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou,
310027, China.
E-mail address: zfcarnation@zju.edu.cn (F. Zhang).
development of the economy, air pollution problems are becoming
more and more serious all over the world. Requirements for man-
aging haze is no longer limited to the acquisition of real-time air
quality monitoring data. Efficiently and accurately predicting the
PM2.5 concentration for a long period in the future have implica-
tions for air pollution prevention and urban management planning.
PM2.5 forecasting methods are mainly divided into two cate-
gories: model-driven methods and data-driven methods. In the last
two decades, model-driven methods are widely used for predicting
by the Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model (Foley
et al., 2010), the Nested Air Quality Prediction Modeling System

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2021.116473
0269-7491/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al.
(NAQPMS) (Wang et al., 2001), and the WRFChem model (Hong
et al., 2020; Chuang et al., 2011). This type of model does not
require a large amount of historical weather data, and the accuracy
of the model prediction depends on how well the model agrees
with the actual atmospheric conditions. In addition, the clear causal
relationship between pollution sources and air pollution makes the
model very interpretable. However, the air pollution emission
source data we obtain is always difficult to be comprehensive and
true, and the amount of calculation is very large, even a super-
computer takes a long time.
Most recently, data-driven approaches have shown their ad-
vantages in predicting the trend of pollutants. As the change of
PM2.5 concentration is periodic and trendy, statistical models for
time series were commonly used in early studies, such as the
autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model (Wang
and Guo, 2009). In contrast to the statistical models, non-
parametric methods can better handle the complex nonlinear re-
lationships of temporal data due to their innate ability, such as
artificial neural networks (ANN) (Pe
rez et al., 2000; Lu et al., 2002)
and support vector machine (SVM) (Lu and Wang, 2005). As a
branch of machine learning, deep learning algorithms extract
complex high-level abstractions as data representations through a
hierarchical learning process (Najafabadi et al., 2015), which offers
significant promise for modeling dynamic temporal correlation.
Extreme gradient boost (Xgboost) (Pan, 2018), deep belief net
(DBN) (Li et al., 2019), and recurrent neural networks (RNN) (Zhao
et al., 2019; Bai et al., 2019) models have been widely applied to
PM2.5 concentration forecasting.
Methods mentioned above focus on the dynamic characteristics
of time and ignore the spatial dependence between monitoring
stations. In deep learning methods, in order to take the spatial
dependency into account, there is a growing interest in blending
spatial learning and sequence learning (Reichstein et al., 2019),
which can take full advantage of spatial and temporal dependency.
The most common combination is the fusion of convolutional
neural networks (CNN) and RNN, such as the Convolutional LSTM
(Xingjian et al., 2015; Pak et al., 2020), Quasi-RNN model (Bradbury
et al., 2016) and APNet model (Huang and Kuo, 2018). However, the
regular convolution operation of these CNN-based methods only
applies to process grid structures (images videos), thereby they are
appropriate for spatial relationships only in the Euclidean space. To
solve this problem, Qi et al. (2019) constructed a station topology
map to describe the spatial relationship based on the station’s
spatial distribution. Through the convolution operation similar to
CNN, the graph is convoluted to extract the spatial relationship.
When forecasting PM2.5 concentration, much of the available
research has considered many other factors related to PM2.5 con-
centration, such as meteorological conditions (e.g., temperature,
humidity, and wind) and other pollutants (e.g., SO22,O3 and PM2.5).
These studies mainly considered correlations between PM2.5 and
these factors but lack the consideration of the causality relationship
between them. In order to make the modeling results more
consistent with the actual situation, we consider incorporating
domain knowledge to enhance the model’s prediction ability. Han Y
et al. (Han et al., 2020) included a regularization term into the
model based on the strong statistical relationship between
PM2.5and PM10 pollution. However, there is no strong causal rela-
tionship between the two of them, thus this constraint is relatively
weak. Comparatively, wind-field has more significant impacts on
the movement and distribution of air pollutants in a region (Li et al.,
2014). The influence of wind-field on PM2.5 can be considered in
terms of direction and speed. Firstly, different wind speeds have
different effects on the diffusion of pollutants. The wind speed
largely determines the diffusion distance of air pollutants, which
directly affects the interaction between stations. Furthermore, due
2
Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473
to the wind-field is dynamic, the spatial autocorrelation of stations
is unstable. Secondly, the wind direction largely determines the
direction of air pollutants spread. The easier it is for the pollutants
at a certain point to spread to the downwind area, and the more
difficult it is to spread to the upwind area. This makes the distri-
bution of PM2.5 under the wind field anisotropic.
For forecasting PM2.5 concentration under the effect of dynamic
wind-field, in this paper, we propose a novel deep-learning
framework Dynamic Directed Spatio-temporal Graph Convolution
Network (DD-STGCN). We use graph convolution and time convo-
lution block to extract spatial dependency and temporal de-
pendency respectively. Besides, according to combining these two
modules, we can further explore the changes in the dependence
relationship that varies with the wind-field.
2. Materials
2.1. Study area
Our study area is suited in the Yangtze River Delta region (Fig. 1),
including Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces, which is one
of the most economically developed regions in China. However,
economic development, population growth, and pollution emis-
sions have led to an increasing decline of the urban ecological
environment. Atmospheric composite pollution dominated by
PM2.5 has a significant impact on the Yangtze River Delta region,
resulting in the continuous increase of ash weather, seriously
jeopardizing people’s health.
2.2. Datasets
The datasets used in this study mainly consisted of hourly in-
situ PM2.5 concentrations and wind-field data.
Observed PM2.5 concentration. In 2012, according to the
Environmental Air Quality Standards revised by the Ministry of
Environmental Protection, China listed PM2.5 as an air quality
monitoring indicator for the first time. From January 2013, the real-
time release platform for urban air quality established by the China
National Environmental Monitoring Center was officially launched
(http://106.37.208.233:20035/). As of 2015, there are 108 national
control stations in the Yangtze River Delta region. In this paper, we
selected the stations with a PM2.5 data loss rate less than 5%, a total
of 57.
Continuous wind-field data. Wind-field data was obtained
from the CERA-SAT atmosphere reanalysis products. The period of
this dataset is from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2016. We
collected 10-m wind data with u and v component in 2015
2016.
These two components represent the airflow in the warp and weft
directions, respectively. Since the time resolution of the prediction
in this paper is 1 h and the temporal resolution of this dataset is 3 h,
we linearly interpolated between data points to generate an hourly
time-series.
3. Methods
3.1. Problem definition
3.1.1. Definition 1
Dynamic graph time-series. We used a directed graph time-
series G ¼ fG 1 ; G 2 ; /; G t g to describe the topological structure
of stations in a dynamic wind-field. G t ¼ ðV t ; E t ; At Þðt 2½1; TÞ
represents a digraph network at time t. V t ¼ fV 1t ; V 2t ; /; V nt g
denotes values of all stations at time t. E t ¼ fE 1t ; E 2t ; /; E nt g
represents the series of links between stations at time t. At 2RNN
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al.
Fig. 1. Study area and dataset. (a) the location of Yangtze River Delta region, including Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. (b) The spatial distribution of PM2.5 monitoring
stations (marked by red circles). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
denotes the adjacency matric of G t . The elements of At are
computed based on the distances between stations.
8 tance to measure the impact factor between the stations.
< 1;
> isj
aij ¼ dij
>
: two steps (Fig. 2). First, with the full-coverage wind-field data ob-
0 ; otherwise
Notably, dij does not indicate Euclidean distance, but the wind-
field distance.
3.1.2. Definition 2
PM2.5 prediction in dynamic wind-field. For the input dynamic
graph series G with length T, by considering the temporal correla-
tion and spatial topological relationship of the graph time-series
fG tT ; /; G t1 g, we can predict the state of the vertex at time t.
The problem can be defined as
c t ¼ argmaxPðV t jV
V tT ; /; V t1 Þ
where fV tT ; /; V t1 g represents the concentration values of
precious graph. V t represents the observed concentration values
c t represents the predictive concentration values at time
at time t. V
t.
3.2. Grpah convolution
3.2.1. Graph construction
A graph can represent the spatial association between geo-
spatial data. When we are forecasting PM2.5 concentration, we need
to consider the spatial connection between the ground monitoring
stations and trained them in collaboration. Traditionally, we
directly used the straight-line distance between stations to repre-
sent the spatial association among the stations and use it as the
edge weight of the graph. In fact, this value can be understood as
the difficulty of interaction between stations. PM2.5 is not
completely freely diffused but will be affected by the wind-field.
Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473
Therefore, when considering the influence of the wind-field in
the PM2.5 prediction problem, we introduced the wind-field dis-
Calculation of the wind-field distance.
(1) The calculation of the wind-field distance can be divided into
tained from the meteorological reanalysis product, we calculated
the wind-field distance between adjacent units in the wind-field,
then we can obtain a diffusion cost surface. Then, based on the
cost surface, we can use the shortest path algorithm (e.g. Dijkstra,
Floyd algorithm) to calculate the wind-field distance between any
two target points.
The critical point here is to calculate the diffusion distance.
Diffusion distance is used to describe the difficulty of diffusing air
pollutants between adjacent units of the wind-field. The Gaussian
diffusion model is a standard model for solving the diffusion
problem in the wind-field. The basic formula of the model is as
(2) follows
!
Q y2 z2
C0 ðx; y; z; uÞ ¼ exp   2 (3)
pusy sz 2sy 2sz
2
where C0 ðx; y; z; uÞ indicates the air pollutant concentration. x and y
represent the downwind distance and the horizontal distance from
the centerline of the wind direction respectively. z denotes the
height of the pollution source. u is the horizontal wind speed. sy
and sz represent the standard deviation of diffusion in the hori-
zontal and vertical directions, respectively. When considering only
horizontal diffusion, the formula can be simplified to (Li et al.,
2014).
costðEAB Þ ¼ ½FðDA ; DM Þ þ FðDB ; DM Þ  LAB (4)
where A and B is the starting and target point. EAB is the edge be-
tween the two points. DA and DB denote the azimuths of these two
points. DM denotes the azimuth of EAB . LA represents the length of
3
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al. Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473

Fig. 2. Steps of calculating wind-field distance. (a) full-coverage wind-field data. (b) Calculate the diffusion cost between adjacent cells and obtain a diffusion cost surface. (c) the
shortest path between two points in the wind-field based on the cost surface.

EAB . the function F is used to calculate the absolute value of azimuth
difference.
3.3. Dynamic directed graph time-series construction
We used the wind-field distance to construct a directed graph
between PM2.5 stations. The graph structure generated at a
particular timestamp is shown in Fig. 3 (a). We used two directed
edges to connect each station with other stations, and the wind-
field distance between the two stations is used to calculate the
weight of edges. Fig. 3(b) shows the adjacency matrix at this
moment. It can be seen that in this matrix, the values on both sides
of the diagonal are complementary. It is easy to understand that
when the pollutants from station A are blown down to station B,
the status of station B hardly affects station A. Because we need to
consider the dynamically changing of the wind network, we
constructed a directed graph of the wind-field every hour.
3.4. Graph convolution neural networks
There are two basic approaches currently being adopted in
extracting the spatial character of a graph. One is in the spatial
domain (vertex domain), which is similar to the CNN on pixels, and
the other is to manipulate in the spectral domain, which is derived
from graph signal processing. For these two convolution methods,
spatial domain-based GCN models can directly handle directed
graphs, such as GraphSage (Hamilton et al., 2017), GAT (Veli ckovi
c
et al., 2017) etc., spatial convolution is similar to the application of
convolution in deep learning. Its core lies in aggregating the in-
formation of neighbour vertices. As for the spectral domain-based
approach, since the spectral convolution method is based on the
assumption of an undirected graph, its Laplacian matrix is

Fig. 3. (a) Generated graph structure of PM2.5 monitoring stations. (b) Weighted adjacency matrix. The deeper of the color stands for the larger value. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

4
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al.
symmetric. Due to the definition of the Laplacian matrix of a
directed graph is ambiguous, scholars have made many improve-
ments to the directed graph convolution (Kampffmeyer et al., 2019;
Monti et al., 2018; Ma et al., 2019), which are more complex than
the former. Furthermore, spectral convolution tends to take more
time than spatial convolution on training. Therefore, in this paper,
we performed the convolution in the spatial domain.
Graph convolution in the spatial domain can be analogized to
convolution directly on the pixels of the picture. Each vertex col-
lects information from its neighbours. Since the strength of the
relationship between the vertex and its neighbours is different, we
need to perform a weighted average calculation on the values of all
vertices. We used the tensor X to denote the signal on the vertices
of graph G, the process of updating the value of the vertex can be
written as
X * ¼ AX (5)
To combine the characteristics of the vertices themselves, a self-
loop is usually added when updating the vertices’ states,
Xi* ¼ Aij Xj þ Xi (6)
X * ¼ ðA þ IÞX (7)
then the adjacency matrix and the corresponding degree matrix
can be written as A ~ ¼ PA
~ ¼ A þ I and D ~ .
ij
j status for each vertex on the graph in the spatial dimension. Before
Because the edge weights of vertices differ widely, the infor-
mation needs to be normalized before updating vertices. The geo-
pffiffiffiffiffiffi
metric mean ab is used for normalization. Thus, Equation (7)
transforms to
~ 1=2 A
X* ¼ D ~D~ 1=2 X (8)
Then, to transform the aggregated feature X * 2Rd of this vertex
to the h dimension, a linear transformation matrix W2 Rdh is
applied on the aggregated result
! spatial convolution to extract the temporal feature of the spatial
~ 1=2 A
~D~ 1=2 X l W l
X lþ1
¼s D (9)
where s represents the activation function.
3.5. Temporal convolution
In space-time forecasting problems, the RNN-based model is
widely used to extract temporal features. Because each step of
these models depends on the result of the previous step, recurrent
neural network training is inefficient. Also, the computational
complexity of RNN forward propagation is OðjSequence LengthjÞ, the
amount of calculation depends on the length of the sequence. Be-
sides, each time step in the long sequence includes a memory I/O
operation, constrained by the GPU’s maximum threads and
maximum memory bandwidth.
To make temporal operation more efficient, we applied the
temporal convolution model, employing a convolution structure
along the time dimension to extract the temporal feature.
Compared with LSTM, even if the LSTM model has a memory gate, it
cannot fully remember all historical information. Yet, the con-
volutional network layer has a causal relationship between the
layers, which means that no historical information or future data
will miss.
For the vertices series V ¼ fV tTP þ1 ; /; V t g in the dynamic
5
Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473
graph series G of length TP , we can treat the timestep as x axis, the
number of the vertices as y axis, the features of vertex as the
number channels, thus the input of the time convolution block Xvl 2
RC T N can be analogized to an image with n channels, the size of
l l
convolution kernel f is ½C l ; C lþ1 ; Q ; 1, the convolution is performed
as
Znlþ1 ¼ Xnl* fln (10)
where Q denotes the size of time window.
For the adjacency matrix time-series, the input of the temporal
convolution is no longer an image, but a 3-D matrix of size N*N*T l .
In our model, whether it is 3-D or 2-D convolution, the size of time
window Q remains the same
ZAlþ1 ¼ XAl *flA (11)
3.6. DD-STGCN model
For a dynamic graph time-series, the temporal convolution layer
is used to update the vertex and adjacency matrix by merging the
dynamic information from the neighbouring time slice separately,
and the spatial graph convolution is used to capture neighbouring
the spatial convolution operation, we first performed time convo-
lution on the dynamically changing vertex and adjacency matrix
time-series to obtain the variation characteristics of adjacent time
slices. Thus, when we collected the state of the neighbour vertices
in the graph convolution to extract the spatial dependency, what
we captured is not the state of the vertex at a single timestamp, but
the temporal characteristics of each neighbour vertex over time.
Since we are modeling the prediction problem in the dynamic
vector field, the spatial dependence between vertices is continu-
ously changing. Then we stacked a temporal convolution after the
characteristics. This combination can make the spatio-temporal
features better integrated. The convolution process can be
expressed as
X tc ¼ sðF*T X Þ (12)
Atc ¼ sðF*T AÞ (13)
!!!
X lþ1
¼ stemp F*T sgraph ~ 1=2 A
D ~D~ 1=2 X l W l (14)
where X tc and Atc represent the new vertex and adjacency matrix
time-series after a temporal convolution operation *T. F denotes
the temporal convolution kernel. stemp and sgraph are activation
functions after temporal and graph convolution respectively.
Finally, we used a fully-connected layer network as a decoder to
turn the hidden vector into the final prediction vertex result. The
schematic of our proposed model DD-STGCN is illustrated in Fig. 4.
The main characteristics of the proposed model can be sum-
marized as follows:
1) The introduction of domain knowledge. We use the dynamic
wind-field distance to define the spatial correlation between
stations, which can make the spatial relationship better
described.
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al. Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473

Fig. 4. The architecture of DD-STGCN. The framework is mainly integrated by temporal convolution block and graph convolution blocks. The temporal convolution blocks are
divided into 2-D and 3-D convolution blocks, which are for vertex and adjacency matrix time-series, respectively. For the input graph series fG tT ; /; G t1 g with length T, we
transform the vertex and adjacency matrix time-series into new ones after temporal convolution. The result can be recombined as a new graph time-series and flows to the graph
convolution block for dynamic spatial feature extraction. In order to fully integrate the spatial and temporal features, we further added a temporal block on the vertex time-series.
Finally, we stack a fully-connected layer in the end to generate the final prediction result.

2) Support for dynamic directed graphs. Previous studies of space-

time prediction have not dealt with the dynamic non-Euclidean PP
n
dependency. By mining and reorganizing the time-series re- joi  pi j
i¼1
lationships between vertices and adjacency matrices, we can MAE ¼ (15)
n
explore the changes in the dependence relationship that varies
with the wind-field.
n  
3) More efficient extraction. The main module of our model, the 100% X 
oi  pi 
MAPE ¼ (16)
n i¼1 oi 

spatio-temporal convolution module, consists of time convolu-
tion and space convolution. Compared with other complex
neural network models, the calculation is more straightforward.
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
uP P
u n
u ðo  pi Þ2
t i¼1 i
3.7. Experimental settings
RMSE ¼ (17)
n

We used the open-source TensorFlow framework to implement
our experiment, and all models are trained on Linux servers. First,
we divided the data into multiple data blocks with a length of 60 h
(history length þ prediction length), then all blocks are randomly
partitioned into a training set (60%), a validation set (20%), and a
test set (20%). In each block, we used the first 12 h of PM2.5 observed
value to forecast 8 time points (1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 24, 36, and 48 h) in the
next 48 h. In order to alleviate the over-fitting of the neural
network, we used the ReLU activation function with sparse acti-
vation characteristics and the dropout strategy to reduce the
connection complexity between neurons. We selected ADAM as the
rules of gradient update.
For evaluating the prediction effect, we calculated the deviation
between the predicted and observed value and the degree of con-
sistency between the two. Therefore, this paper uses Mean Abso-
lute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Errors (MAPE), and
Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) as evaluation indicators.
6
where oi and pi denote the observed value and predicted value of
the i-th sample. o denotes the mean value of observations.
We evaluated our proposed model by comparing it with three
baselines:
(1) LSTM. LSTM model is a type of RNN designed to capture long
term dependencies in sequential data. It is widely used in
many time-series prediction problems, but cannot model
spatial relationships.
(2) GC-LSTM (Qi et al., 2019). GC-LSTM is the state-of-the-art
model in PM2.5 forecasting based on graph convolution. It
embeds the graph convolution network and long short-term
memory network. Experiments (Qi et al., 2019) have proved
that GC-LSTM performs better than LSTM due to the
considering of spatial dependency.
(3) STGCN (Yu et al., 2017). To illustrate the advantages of
considering dynamic wind-fields, we use the Euclidean
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al. Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473

distance between the stations as the input of the DD-STGCN
model, and keep the same input for each time step.
4. Result and discussion
4.1. Comparison of model performance
In this part, DD-STGCN is compared with the state-of-the-art
forecasting approaches: the LSTM, GC-LSTM, and STGCN models.
Table 1 shows the performances of our approach and those used as
baselines for hourly PM2.5 forecasting. The comparison of the four
models reveals that the performance of the DD-STGCN model is
better than the other three models according to the MAPE, MAE,
and RMSE values. This highlights the importance of considering the
dynamic directional spatial and temporal dependency in fore-
casting PM25 concentration.
Compared to LSTM that only considers the time dimension,
models using graph structure exhibited better results. The result
shows that, for the prediction results in short, middle and long
term, compared with LSTM, MAPE, MAE and RMSE of GC-LSTM
improved by 10.9%, 12.1%, 14.9% (1e8 h), 6.1%, 7.2%, 12.2%
(12e24 h) and 2.3%, 7.5%, 4.9% (36e48 h), respectively. From the
experiments performed, it turns out that there is a significant in-
crease in accuracy after accounting for spatial correlation, espe-
cially in short-term forecasting.
For GC-LSTM and STGCN that are both loaded on the factor of
spatial correlation, the accuracy improvement of STGCN was 10.3%
(MAPE),11.6% (MAE), and 8.0% (RMSE) over a 48-h period. Along
with that, we have found for the first 12 h, the improvement of
forecast accuracy was below average (7.7% for MAPE, 8.9% for MAE,
5.6% for RMSE), while after 12 h, accuracy improvement is more
obvious (14.5% for MAPE, 16.2% for MAE, 12.0% for RMSE). This
demonstrates that for long-term forecasts over 12 h, our stacked
network structure and the replacement of LSTM with TCN has
advantages in reducing accuracy degradation.
The previous two spatial topological models only consider the
static spatial dependence relationship under the Euclidean distance
and do not take into account the dynamic change of the field. By
modeling directed dynamic topological relationships, the DD-
STGCN model effectively improved the prediction accuracy. We
can see that three evaluation indicators of the DD-STGCN model in
the first hour were 11.8% (MAPE),13.3% (MAE), and 9.5% (RMSE)
lower than those of STGCN, which indicates that the directional
information of the wind-field plays a supporting role in forecasting
and is conducive to describe the spatial dependence between
stations.
In order to further compare the prediction capabilities of four
models, we draw line charts and scatter plots (Fig. 5) of predicted
and observed values on the test set of each model. The scatter trend
lines’ slopes of the four models are all less than 1. For DD-STGCN
and STGCN, there was an underestimation of the predicted value
in high-value areas, but the fitting in the low-value area was much
better. However, For LSTM and GC-LSTM, there was a significant
underestimation in both high-value and low-value cases. Of the
four models, it can be seen from Fig. 5 that our model showed the
best fit between the predicted and observed values, the correlation
coefficient (R2) is 0.75, which is visibly higher than those of other
three models (0.72, 0.67 and 0.63 respectively). This shows that
there was a remarkable improvement with the prediction accuracy
by considering the directed wind-fields.
To study the difference in error between the two models after
considering the wind-field, we used the wind-field data to draw
wind frequency rose charts. Fig. 6(a) is the wind speed-wind fre-
quency rose chart, and Fig. 6(b) is the error difference-wind fre-
quency rose chart. It can be seen that data with the highest wind
speed in the test concentrated on the northeast (Fig. 6(a)). In
conjunction with Fig. 6(b), it suggests that the data with the larger
error in the test set is also concentrated in the northeast and
southwest direction. We can infer that this is because the higher
wind speed leads to a more apparent difference between the wind-
field distance and the conventional distance. Therefore, we believe
that the consideration of wind speed is helpful in improving the
prediction accuracy of the model.
4.2. Forecast of PM2.5 concentration during a haze period
For air pollutants such as PM2.5, the influence of the wind-field
on its concentration is more evident on the daily or hourly scale.
When the various meteorological factors (e.g., rainfall, air pressure,
temperature) are relatively stable, the effect of the wind-field is the
main factor that changes the spatial distribution of PM2.5 concen-
tration. In conditions of strong wind, it is more important to
consider the wind-field factor in forecasting. We used a short-term
case to observe the impact of the wind-field on the prediction
result.
We selected data from December 13 to December 15 in 2015 as
the research time for the Yangtze River Delta region, and this is a
typical case of pollution intrusion. As can be seen from Fig. 7, on
December 13, the pollutants slowly moved to the southwest, and
the wind-field turned to the northwest wind the next day. The
pollutants then diffused from west to east and north to south. On
the 15th, the pollutant continued migration to the southeast, the
Yangtze River Delta region was severely polluted, and pollution in
North China had dissipated, the air quality was getting better.
We used kriging interpolation for the prediction results at each
station. Fig. 7(a) shows the result after the observations are inter-
polated, and Fig. 7(b) shows the result from our model. From the
perspective of the trend, the difference between our model and the

Table 1
The result for hourly prediction values of PM2.5 of different models.

model metric þ1 h þ2 h þ4 h þ8 h þ12 h þ24 h þ36 h þ48 h

LSTM MAPE (%) 26.43 28.35 28.78 33.22 33.98 35.67 36.33 37.65
MAE 16.45 18.84 20.22 24.87 24.43 27.56 29.87 30.61
RMSE 25.25 27.93 28.90 30.34 32.11 36.30 37.21 37.01
GC-LSTM MAPE (%) 24.20 25.28 25.59 28.75 31.88 34.56 36.01 36.29
MAE 15.20 17.48 18.01 19.27 22.44 25.80 27.63 28.31
RMSE 22.19 23.73 24.34 25.28 27.99 32.06 34.89 35.66
STGCN MAPE (%) 21.81 23.40 24.33 26.29 28.48 30.73 30.98 30.69
MAE 13.98 16.34 16.49 17.94 19.15 22.32 22.99 23.13
RMSE 20.87 22.12 22.89 24.67 26.02 28.34 30.23 31.67
DD-STGCN MAPE (%) 19.23 20.44 22.23 23.45 26.41 28.02 28.78 29.03
MAE 12.13 14.12 15.08 16.33 18.40 20.44 22.9 23.01
RMSE 18.90 19.41 20.22 22.51 24.62 27.23 28.11 29.47

7
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al.
Fig. 5. Line charts of daily predicted and observed value of different models on test data (left). Correlation between the predicted and predicted value on test data in 1-h prediction
(right).
real value was not large, and they all showed a trend of migration
from northwest to southeast.
To better illustrate the advantages of considering wind-field, we
choose the concentration distribution at noon on the 14th as an
example. In order to show the situation of the entire contaminated
area more clearly, we expanded the scope of our research to the
8
Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473
west. We selected STGCN and DD-STGCN model to study the spatial
distribution of the standard deviation ellipse for the predicted
pollutant distribution. To try to make the comparison more equi-
table, we also fed wind-field information into STGCN as two input
channels, that is, wind speed in u and v direction.
From the results of kriging interpolation (Fig. 8), the distribution
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al. Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473

Fig. 6. (a) wind rose diagram on test dataset. (b) RMSE difference wind rose diagram.

Fig. 7. Spatial variations of the interpolation result. (a) Interpolation result of observed data. (b) Interpolation result of predicted data of DD-STGCN.

of two models in this region was basically the same on Dec.14th,
generally featuring south-low-north-high, and there was a clear
striped area with an east-west orientation. Besides, in the central
region of Jiangsu province, the STGCN model is obviously
overestimated.
For a better comparison of the spatial distribution of forecast
results, we used the direction distribution tool to generate the
standard deviation ellipse containing 68% of the data. It can be seen
from Fig. 8 that the standard deviation ellipses of three cases
basically covered highly polluted areas, and they were all in a
northeast-southwest direction. Due to the overestimation of
STGCN, the area of the STGCN’s standard deviation ellipse is larger
than the areas of the observed value and DD-STGCN’s ellipse. We
superimposed the standard deviation ellipse with the wind-field.
The direction of the long axis of the two ellipses was consistent
with the wind-field (blue arrows in Fig. 8), indicating that the
directionality of pollution distribution is closely related to the
wind-field. We further calculated the ellipse’s oblateness. For the

9
H. Zhou, F. Zhang, Z. Du et al.
Fig. 8. Standard deviational ellipse (the green ellipse) on December 14 for different model: (a) observed data (b)STGCN (c)DD-STGCN. (For interpretation of the references to color in
this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
spatial distribution of observed data, the oblateness of the ellipse is
0.58, which has obvious characteristics of distribution along the
direction of 135 . Compared with the pure data-driven model
(oblateness ¼ 0.47), our model (oblateness ¼ 0.60) has a better
performance in maintaining directionality.
Through this case, both models consider wind speed and wind
direction at the same time, but the STGCN model only used wind
field information as input factors simply, while our model used
domain knowledge to measure the interaction between the two
stations. The experimental results showed that our model can not
only improve the prediction accuracy but also make the prediction
results more reasonable in the spatial distribution.
5. Conclusion
In this study, we have proposed a hybrid deep learning model
DD-STGCN for forecasting PM2.5 concentration in the dynamic
wind-field. Firstly, we constructed a dynamic graph time-series by
calculating the field distance, and further adopted temporal
convolution and graph convolution models to perform temporal
and spatial feature extraction on the vertexes and edges of the
graph time-series, respectively. Our experiment results indicated
that the proposed model achieved better fitting and prediction
performances than the LSTM, GC-LSTM, and STGCN model by
comparing RMSE, MAE, and MAPE. After incorporating domain
knowledge in our model, we found that there was a significant
improvement in prediction accuracy, especially in the case of high
wind speed. Furthermore, we chose a special period of heavy
pollution to analyze the performance of our model in a short
period, experiment results showed that the interpolation result
distribution of our predicted values is more realistic and has the
advantage in maintaining directionality. We can further optimize
the model from the following aspects: (i) More experiments on
other regions and periods need to be conducted for further verifi-
cation, (ii) extend the model from single-factor prediction to multi-
factor prediction, (iii) consider the trend and periodicity of PM2.5
concentration changes.
In this paper, we use domain knowledge to optimize the spatio-
temporal prediction model of PM2.5 concentration, but it is still not
sufficient. In the next step of our work, we will continue to explore
hybrid modeling which combines the strengths of physical
modeling (theoretical foundations, interpretable compartments)
and machine learning (data-adaptiveness) (Reichstein et al., 2019).
10
Environmental Pollution 273 (2021) 116473
We will consider combining the propagation process mechanism of
PM2.5 with deep learning methods to make the model more
physically realistic.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of
China (2018YFB0505000), National Natural Science Foundation of
China (41671391, 41922043, 41871287).
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