Prediction of dust fall concentrations in urban atmospheric environment through support vector regression

Support vector regression (SVR) method is a novel type of learning machine algorithms, which is seldom applied to the development of urban atmospheric quality models under multiple socio-economic factors. This study presents four SVR models by selecting linear, radial basis, spline, and polynomial functions as kernels, respectively for the prediction of urban dust fall levels. The inputs of the models are identified as industrial coal consumption, population density, traffic flow coefficient, and shopping density coefficient. The training and testing results show that the SVR model with radial basis kernel performs better than the other three both in the training and testing processes. In addition, a number of scenario analyses reveal that the most suitable parameters (insensitive loss function ɛ, the parameter to reduce the influence of error C, and discrete level or average distribution of parameters σ) are 0.001, 0.5, and 2 000, respectively.