Acidic Gas Prediction Modeling Based on Shared Features and Inverted Transformer of Municipal Solid Waste Incineration Processes

Effective management of municipal solid waste is crucial for achieving sustainable development and maintaining a healthy ecological environment. Municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) processes are highly nonlinear and exhibit strong coupling characteristics, which makes long-term stable control challenging. Accurate prediction of the various toxic and harmful acidic gases that will be generated during this process is crucial for supporting optimization and control research. This study proposes a predictive model for acidic gases using Random Forest (RF) and Inverted Transformer (ITransformer). First, the RF algorithm is used to identify feature variables that strongly correlate with the target variables, thereby facilitating the shared feature selection process for multiple acidic gases. These selected features are then fed into a multi-output ITransformer model, which predicts the target variables and generates multiple evaluation metrics. Finally, the model’s hyperparameters are optimized based on these metrics and the threshold ranges of the acidic gases. The experimental results using real data from a specific incineration plant show that 13 features remain after the shared feature selection process. Compared to other models, the proposed approach uses the fewest shared features while reducing computational costs. Moreover, the R² values for NOx, SO₂, and HCl are 0.9791, 0.9793, and 0.9838, respectively.