kth.sePublications KTH
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Interpretable long-horizon air pollution forecasting using a transformer-based framework
KTH, School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Civil and Architectural Engineering, Transport planning.ORCID iD: 0009-0001-1295-1917
KTH, School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Civil and Architectural Engineering, Transport planning. KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Centres, Digital futures.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5526-4511
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Norrköping, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4695-1106
SLB-analys, Environment and Health Administration, City of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7889-1964
Show others and affiliations
2026 (English)In: Expert Systems with Applications, ISSN 0957-4174, Vol. 315, article id 131719Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Accurate and interpretable air pollution forecasting is essential for public health and proactive intervention. While deep learning models have achieved strong performance in long-horizon forecasting, they often require aligned historical sequences and provide limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Transformer-based framework that integrates historical observations with auxiliary forecasts to enhance predictive performance while providing built-in interpretability. The framework introduces two core components: a Structured Temporal Embedding Module (STEM) for preserving the semantic integrity of heterogeneous inputs, and an eXplainable Target-Oriented Cross-Attention (X2-Attention) mechanism that aligns future predictions with known inputs to yield fine-grained attribution for each forecasted timestep across both temporal and feature dimensions. Evaluated on diverse urban and suburban datasets in Stockholm, our model simultaneously delivers reliable interpretability and superior predictive accuracy. Compared to five baselines (TimeXer, Crossformer, iTransformer, Transformer and LSTM), it exhibits significantly lower Mean Squared Error (MSE) for NOX and competitive performance for PM10 across horizons up to 720 hours. Ablation studies reveal that incorporating auxiliary forecasts reduces MSE by 29 % for NOX and 15 % for PM10. Moreover, the X2-Attention mechanism generates plausible feature attribution validated through perturbation analysis. Its attributions are consistent with GradientSHAP while avoiding prohibitive computational overhead, thereby facilitating efficient air quality forecasting.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier BV , 2026. Vol. 315, article id 131719
Keywords [en]
Air quality and health risk, Explainable AI, Meteorological forecast integration, Multi-horizon forecasting
National Category
Computer graphics and computer vision Computer Sciences Probability Theory and Statistics Bioinformatics (Computational Biology)
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-380039DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2026.131719ISI: 001707123300001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105034518146OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-380039DiVA, id: diva2:2055474
Note

QC 20260424

Available from: 2026-04-24 Created: 2026-04-24 Last updated: 2026-04-30Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(6325 kB)64 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 6325 kBChecksum SHA-512
3931408532377de782816e2a945a37478a82c027b8e5c40638bbf2a286decad15fba8964cb18b0d6bc4189eb6eafa1d17dda53531d3d8f34ef696d98c8ed7f2c
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Other links

Publisher's full textScopus

Authority records

Zhang, ZhiguoMa, Xiaoliang

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Zhang, ZhiguoMa, XiaoliangEngardt, MagnuzSchlesinger, DanielJohansson, Christer
By organisation
Transport planningDigital futures
Computer graphics and computer visionComputer SciencesProbability Theory and StatisticsBioinformatics (Computational Biology)

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 842 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf