Development and Evaluation of Spatio-Temporal Air Pollution Exposure Models and Their Combinations in the Greater London Area, UK

Land use regression (LUR) and dispersion/chemical transport models (D/CTMs) are frequently applied to predict exposure to air pollution concentrations at a fine scale for use in epidemiological studies. Moreover, the use of satellite aerosol optical depth data has been a key predictor especially for particulate matter pollution and when studying large populations. Within the STEAM project we present a hybrid spatio-temporal modeling framework by (a) incorporating predictions from dispersion modeling of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), ozone (O₃) and particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter equal or less than 10 μm (PM10) and less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) into a spatio-temporal LUR model; and (b) combining the predictions LUR and dispersion modeling and additionally, only for PM2.5, from an ensemble machine learning approach using a generalized additive model (GAM). We used air pollution measurements from 2009 to 2013 from 62 fixed monitoring sites for O3, 115 for particles and up to 130 for NO₂, obtained from the dense network in the Greater London Area, UK. We assessed all models following a 10-fold cross validation (10-fold CV) procedure. The hybrid models performed better compared to separate LUR models. Incorporation of the dispersion estimates in the LUR models as a predictor, improved the LUR model fit: CV-R² increased to 0.76 from 0.71 for NO₂, to 0.79 from 0.57 for PM10, to 0.81 to 0.66 for PM2.5 and to 0.75 from 0.62 for O₃. The CV-R² obtained from the hybrid GAM framework was also increased compared to separate LUR models (CV-R² = 0.80 for NO₂, 0.76 for PM10, 0.79 for PM2.5 and 0.75 for O₃). Our study supports the combined use of different air pollution exposure assessment methods in a single modeling framework to improve the accuracy of spatio-temporal predictions for subsequent use in epidemiological studies. View Full-Text