ORIGINAL RESEARCH
STAMGCN: A Spatio-Temporal Attention-Based Multi-Graph Convolution Model for Fine-Grained Air Quality Analysis
,
 
,
 
,
 
 
 
More details
Hide details
1
College of Automation (College of Artificial Intelligence), Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing 102206, China
 
 
Submission date: 2025-08-14
 
 
Final revision date: 2025-10-15
 
 
Acceptance date: 2025-11-02
 
 
Online publication date: 2026-03-04
 
 
Corresponding author
Wenbai Chen   

College of Automation (College of Artificial Intelligence), Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing 102206, China
 
 
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Air pollution poses significant global health challenges, underscoring the need for highly detailed spatial predictions to inform effective environmental policy and safeguard public health. This study introduces a novel Spatio-Temporal Attention-based Multi-Graph Convolutional Network (STAMGCN) designed for fine-grained air quality prediction. The framework constructs spatial, atmospheric pollution-pattern, and meteorological-pattern graphs to represent complex, non-Euclidean regional relationships. Through graph convolutional networks, the model aggregates contextual information from adjacent nodes, followed by a fine-grained attention mechanism that emphasizes interactions between the target and nearby monitoring stations. By leveraging gated recurrent units with temporal attention, STAMGCN effectively captures evolving air quality changes. Experiments conducted on the Beijing dataset demonstrate that the model improves prediction accuracy by 10.18% for immediate forecasts and 15.56% for 6-hour forecasts compared to baseline spatio-temporal models. These results highlight the model’s potential to support urban air-quality management and provide a robust scientific foundation for pollution-control strategies.
CONFLICT OF 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.
REFERENCES (34)
1.
APTE J.S., BRAUER M., COHEN A.J., EZZATI M., POPE C. Ambient PM2.5 reduces global and regional life expectancy. Environmental Science & Technology Letters. 5 (9), 546, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.es....
 
2.
VALLERO D.A. Fundamentals of air pollution. Academic press. 154, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0....
 
3.
KUMAR P. A critical evaluation of air quality index models (1960-2021). Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. 194 (5), 1, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661....
 
4.
ORGANIZATION W.H. WHO ambient air quality database, 2022 update: status report. World Health Organization, 100, 2023.
 
5.
PRASHANT K., KUMAR P., PATTON A.P., DURANT J.L., CHRISTOPHER F.H. A review of factors impacting exposure to PM2.5, ultrafine particles and black carbon in Asian transport microenvironments. Atmospheric Environment. 187, 301, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmo....
 
6.
CHEN W., TANG H., ZHAO H. Diurnal, weekly and monthly spatial variations of air pollutants and air quality of Beijing. Atmospheric Environment. 119, 21, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmo....
 
7.
HOOD C., MACKENZIE I., STOCKER J., JOHNSON K., CARRUTHERS D., VIENO M., DOHERTY R. Air quality simulations for London using a coupled regional-to-local modelling system. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 18 (15), 11221, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18....
 
8.
KIM Y., WU Y., SEIGNEUR C., YOUNGSEOB K., CHRISTIAN S., YELVA R. Multi-scale modeling of urban air pollution: Development and application of a Street-in-Grid model (v1.0) by coupling MUNICH (v1.0) and Polair3D (v1.8.1). Geoscientific Model Development. 11 (2), 611, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11....
 
9.
SANTIAGO J.L., BORGE R., MARTIN F., PAZ D., MARTILLI A., LUMBRERAS J., SANCHEZ B. Evaluation of a CFD-based approach to estimate pollutant distribution within a real urban canopy by means of passive samplers. Science of The Total Environment. 576, 46, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scit....
 
10.
POKHREL R., LEE H. Comparison of Gaussian plume model and lagrangian particle model for the application of coastal air quality modelling. American Journal of Environmental and Resource Economics. 4 (4), 152, 2019. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.aje....
 
11.
GARIAZZO C., PAPALEO V., PELLICCIONI A., CALORI G., RADICE P., TINARELLI G. Application of a Lagrangian particle model to assess the impact of harbour, industrial and urban activities on air quality in the Taranto area, Italy. Atmospheric Environment. 41 (30), 6432, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmo....
 
12.
HUANG H., AKUTSU Y., ARAI M., TAMURA M. A two-dimensional air quality model in an urban street canyon: evaluation and sensitivity analysis. Atmospheric Environment. 34 (5), 689, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1352-....
 
13.
HSIEH H.-P., WU S., KO C.-C., SHEI C., YAO Z.-T., CHEN Y.-W. Forecasting fine-grained air quality for locations without monitoring stations based on a hybrid predictor with spatial-temporal attention based network. Applied Sciences. 12 (9), 4268, 2022. https://doi.org/10.3390/app120....
 
14.
GUPTA N.S., MOHTA Y., HEDA K., ARMAAN R., VALARMATHI B., ARULKUMARA N. Prediction of air quality index using machine learning techniques: a comparative analysis. Journal of Environmental and Public Health. 2023, 1, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/4....
 
15.
LIU B., JIN Y., LI C. Analysis and prediction of air quality in Nanjing from autumn 2018 to summer 2019 using PCR-SVR-ARMA combined model. Scientific Reports. 11 (1), 348, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598....
 
16.
ABHILASH M., THAKUR A., GUPTA D., SREEVIDYA B. Time series analysis of air pollution in Bengaluru using ARIMA model. Proceedings of the Ambient Communications and Computer Systems: RACCCS. 2017, 413, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-98....
 
17.
GU K., ZHOU Y., SUN H., ZHAO L., LIU S. Prediction of air quality in Shenzhen based on neural network algorithm. Neural Computing and Applications. 32, 1879, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521....
 
18.
KUMAR D. Evolving Differential evolution method with random forest for prediction of Air Pollution. Procedia Computer Science. 132, 824, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proc....
 
19.
ABDULLAH S., ISMAIL M., AHMED A. Multi-layer perceptron model for air quality prediction. Malaysian Journal of Mathematical Sciences. 13, 85, 2019.
 
20.
LIU X., GUO H. Air quality indicators and AQI prediction coupling long-short term memory (LSTM) and sparrow search algorithm (SSA): A case study of Shanghai. Atmospheric Pollution Research. 13 (10), 101551, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apr.....
 
21.
WANG X., YAN J., WANG X., WANG Y. Air quality forecasting using GRU model based on multiple sensors nodes. IEEE Sensors Letters. 7 (7), 1, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1109/LSENS.....
 
22.
LI X., PENG L., YAO X., CUI S., HU Y., YOU C., CHI T. Long short-term memory neural network for air pollutant concentration predictions: Method development and evaluation. Environmental Pollution. 231, 997, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envp....
 
23.
GILIK A., OGRENCI A.S., OZMEN A. Air quality prediction using CNN+LSTM-based hybrid deep learning architecture. Environmental Science and Pollution Research. 29 (8), 11920, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356....
 
24.
YAN R., LIAO J., YANG J., SUN W., LI F. Multi-hour and multi-site air quality index forecasting in Beijing using CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM, and spatiotemporal clustering. Expert Systems with Applications. 169, 114513, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa....
 
25.
LIAO H., YUAN L., WU M., CHEN H. Air quality prediction by integrating mechanism model and machine learning model. Science of The Total Environment. 899, 165646, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scit....
 
26.
WU C.-L., SONG R.-F., ZHU X.-H., PENG Z.-R., FU Q.-Y., PAN J. A hybrid deep learning model for regional O3 and NO2 concentrations prediction based on spatiotemporal dependencies in air quality monitoring network. Environmental Pollution. 320, 121075, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envp....
 
27.
CHEN J., YUAN C., DONG S., FENG J., WANG H. A novel spatiotemporal multigraph convolutional network for air pollution prediction. Applied Intelligence. 53 (15), 18319, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489....
 
28.
LIANG Y., XIA Y., KE S., WANG Y., WEN Q., ZHANG J., ZHENG Y., ZIMMERMANN R.H. Airformer: Predicting nationwide air quality in China with transformers. Proceedings of the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 37 (12), 14329, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v....
 
29.
XU Y., ZHU Y. When remote sensing data meet ubiquitous urban data: Fine-grained air quality inference. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 1252, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigDat....
 
30.
ZHAO Y., FAN S., XIA K., JIA Y., WANG L., YANG W. ASTGC: Attention-based spatio-temporal fusion graph convolution model for fine-grained air quality analysis. Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health. 16 (9), 1761, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869....
 
31.
QI Z., WANG T., SONG G., HU W., ZHANG Z. Deep air learning: Interpolation, prediction, and feature analysis of fine-grained air quality. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 30 (12), 2285, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2....
 
32.
HAN J., LIU H., XIONG H., YANG J. Semi-supervised air quality forecasting via self-supervised hierarchical graph neural network. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 35 (5), 5230, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2....
 
33.
CHENG W., SHEN Y., ZHU Y., HUANG L. A neural attention model for urban air quality inference: Learning the weights of monitoring stations. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 32 (1), 2151, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v....
 
34.
HAN Q., LU D., CHEN R. Fine-Grained Air Quality Inference via Multi-Channel Attention Model. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2512, 2021. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai....
 
eISSN:2083-5906
ISSN:1230-1485
Journals System - logo
Scroll to top