High-Resolution Air Quality Prediction Using Low-Cost Sensors

The use of low-cost sensors in air quality monitoring networks is still a much-debated topic among practitioners: they are much cheaper than traditional air quality monitoring stations set up by public authorities (a few hundred dollars compared to a few dozens of thousand dollars) at the cost of a lower accuracy and robustness. This paper presents a case study of using low-cost sensors measurements in an air quality prediction engine. The engine predicts jointly PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations in the United States at a very high resolution in the range of a few dozens of meters. It is fed with the measurements provided by official air quality monitoring stations, the measurements provided by a network of more than 4000 low-cost sensors across the country, and traffic estimates. We show that the use of low-cost sensors' measurements improves the engine's accuracy very significantly. In particular, we derive a strong link between the density of low-cost sensors and the predictions' accuracy: the more low-cost sensors are in an area, the more accurate are the predictions. As an illustration, in areas with the highest density of low-cost sensors, the low-cost sensors' measurements bring a 25% and 15% improvement in PM2.5 and PM10 predictions' accuracy respectively. An other strong conclusion is that in some areas with a high density of low-cost sensors, the engine performs better when fed with low-cost sensors' measurements only than when fed with official monitoring stations' measurements only: this suggests that an air quality monitoring network composed of low-cost sensors is effective in monitoring air quality. This is a very important result, as such a monitoring network is much cheaper to set up.