Air pollution models in epidemiologic studies with geostatistics and machine learning

Development of air pollution models for large regions is a priority for population-based epidemiologic studies. The rapid development of big data information systems and machine learning algorithms have opened new grounds for refinements of current model frameworks. This commentary overviews recent contributions and outlines extensions from geostatistics and machine learning perspectives. For the coming years, expected advances will expand the use of learning algorithms to model spatial trends and incorporate spatial covariance models in the learning processes. These extensions will refine existing modelling frameworks contributing to improve accuracy of air pollution models for exposure assessment.