PM2.5 Estimation in the Czech Republic using Extremely Randomized Trees: A Comprehensive Data Analysis

The accuracy of artificial intelligence techniques in estimating air quality is contingent upon a multitude of influencing factors. Unlike our previous study that examined PM2.5 over whole Europe using unbalanced spatial-temporal data, the focus of this study was on estimating PM2.5 specifically over the Czech Republic using more balanced dataset to train and evaluate the model. Moreover, the spatial autocorrelation between the ground-based station was taken into consideration while building the model. The feature importance while developing the Extra Trees model revealed that spatial autocorrelation had greater significance in comparison to commonly used inputs such as elevation and NDVI. We found that R2 of the 10-CV for the new model was 16% higher than the previous one. R2 reached 0.85 when predicting unseen data in new locations. The developed spatiotemporal model was employed to generate comprehensive daily maps covering the entire study area throughout the 2018–2020 years. The temporal analysis showed that the levels of PM2.5 exceeded recommended limits of 20 µg/m3 during the year 2018 in many regions. The eastern part of the country suffered from the highest concentrations especially over Zlín and Moravian-Silesian Regions where in the 2018 winter, the values reached risky average concentrations of 30 µg/m3 and 35 µg/m3 respectively. Air quality improved during the next two years in all regions reaching promising levels in 2020 where almost all regions had average concentrations less than 20 µg/m3. The generated dataset will be available for other future air quality studies.