STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.

Accurately predicting air pollutant concentrations can reduce health risks and provide crucial references for environmental governance. In pollution prediction tasks, three key factors are essential: (1) dynamic dependencies among global monitoring stations should be considered in spatial feature ex...

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Main Authors: Huazhen Xu, Wei Song, Lanmei Qian, Xiangxiang Mei, Guojian Zou
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2025-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328532
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author Huazhen Xu
Wei Song
Lanmei Qian
Xiangxiang Mei
Guojian Zou
author_facet Huazhen Xu
Wei Song
Lanmei Qian
Xiangxiang Mei
Guojian Zou
author_sort Huazhen Xu
collection DOAJ
description Accurately predicting air pollutant concentrations can reduce health risks and provide crucial references for environmental governance. In pollution prediction tasks, three key factors are essential: (1) dynamic dependencies among global monitoring stations should be considered in spatial feature extraction due to the diffusion properties of air pollutants; (2) precise temporal correlation modeling is critical because pollutant concentrations change dynamically and periodically; (3) it is vital to avoid propagation of long-term prediction errors across spatiotemporal dimensions. To address these challenges, we propose STGATN, a novel spatiotemporal graph attention network with an encoder-decoder architecture. Both the encoder and decoder incorporate a spatiotemporal embedding mechanism, a spatiotemporal graph attention block, a gated temporal convolutional network, and a fusion gate. Specifically, the spatiotemporal graph attention module is designed to use temporal and graph attention networks to extract dynamic spatiotemporal correlations. The gated temporal convolutional network is constructed to capture the long-term temporal causal relationships. The fusion gate adaptively fuses the spatiotemporal correlations and temporal causal relationships. In addition, a spatiotemporal embedding mechanism, including positional and temporal information, is added to account for pollutants' periodicity and station-specific properties. Moreover, this paper proposes a transformer attention that establishes direct dependencies between future and historical time steps to avoid prediction error accumulation in the dynamic decoding process. The experimental results show that the proposed prediction model significantly outperforms the latest baseline methods on the air pollution dataset from actual monitoring stations in Beijing City.
format Article
id doaj-art-d202a379327646e28b9dadeb63c65700
institution Kabale University
issn 1932-6203
language English
publishDate 2025-01-01
publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
record_format Article
series PLoS ONE
spelling doaj-art-d202a379327646e28b9dadeb63c657002025-08-20T03:43:55ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032025-01-01207e032853210.1371/journal.pone.0328532STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.Huazhen XuWei SongLanmei QianXiangxiang MeiGuojian ZouAccurately predicting air pollutant concentrations can reduce health risks and provide crucial references for environmental governance. In pollution prediction tasks, three key factors are essential: (1) dynamic dependencies among global monitoring stations should be considered in spatial feature extraction due to the diffusion properties of air pollutants; (2) precise temporal correlation modeling is critical because pollutant concentrations change dynamically and periodically; (3) it is vital to avoid propagation of long-term prediction errors across spatiotemporal dimensions. To address these challenges, we propose STGATN, a novel spatiotemporal graph attention network with an encoder-decoder architecture. Both the encoder and decoder incorporate a spatiotemporal embedding mechanism, a spatiotemporal graph attention block, a gated temporal convolutional network, and a fusion gate. Specifically, the spatiotemporal graph attention module is designed to use temporal and graph attention networks to extract dynamic spatiotemporal correlations. The gated temporal convolutional network is constructed to capture the long-term temporal causal relationships. The fusion gate adaptively fuses the spatiotemporal correlations and temporal causal relationships. In addition, a spatiotemporal embedding mechanism, including positional and temporal information, is added to account for pollutants' periodicity and station-specific properties. Moreover, this paper proposes a transformer attention that establishes direct dependencies between future and historical time steps to avoid prediction error accumulation in the dynamic decoding process. The experimental results show that the proposed prediction model significantly outperforms the latest baseline methods on the air pollution dataset from actual monitoring stations in Beijing City.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328532
spellingShingle Huazhen Xu
Wei Song
Lanmei Qian
Xiangxiang Mei
Guojian Zou
STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.
PLoS ONE
title STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.
title_full STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.
title_fullStr STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.
title_full_unstemmed STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.
title_short STGATN: A novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations.
title_sort stgatn a novel spatiotemporal graph attention network for predicting pollutant concentrations at multiple stations
url https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328532
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