Advanced Trans-BiGRU-QA Fusion Model for Atmospheric Mercury Prediction

Abstract

With the deepening of the Industrial Revolution and the rapid development of the chemical industry, the large-scale emissions of corrosive dust and gases from numerous factories have become a significant source of air pollution. Mercury in the atmosphere, identified by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as one of the globally concerning air pollutants, has been proven to pose a threat to the human environment with potential carcinogenic risks. Therefore, accurately predicting atmospheric mercury concentration is of critical importance. This study proposes a novel advanced model—the Trans-BiGRU-QA hybrid—designed to predict the atmospheric mercury concentration accurately. Methodology includes feature engineering techniques to extract relevant features and applies a sliding window technique for time series data preprocessing. Furthermore, the proposed Trans-BiGRU-QA model is compared to other deep learning models, such as GRU, LSTM, RNN, Transformer, BiGRU, and Trans-BiGRU. This study utilizes air quality data from Vietnam to train and test the models, evaluating their performance in predicting atmospheric mercury concentration. The results show that the Trans-BiGRU-QA model performed exceptionally well in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and R-squared (R2), demonstrating high accuracy and robustness. Compared to other deep learning models, the Trans-BiGRU-QA model exhibited significant advantages, indicating its broad potential for application in environmental pollution prediction.