A stochastic exposure model integrating random forest and agent-based approaches: Evaluation for PM2.5 in Jiangsu, China
2022
Zhou, Qi | Wang, Xin | Shu, Ye | Sun, Li | Jin, Zhou | Ma, Zongwei | Liu, Miaomiao | Bi, Jun | Kinney, Patrick L.
This research proposes an Activity Pattern embedded Air Pollution Exposure Model (AP2EM), based on survey data of when, where, and how people spend their time and indoor/outdoor ratios for microenvironments. AP2EM integrates random forest and agent-based approaches to simulate the stochastic exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) along with indoor and in-vehicle PM₂.₅ of outdoor origin. The R² of the linear regression between the model's calculations and personal measurement was 0.65, which was more accurate than the commonly-used aggregated exposure (AE) model and the outdoor exposure (OE) model. The population-weighted PM₂.₅ exposure estimated by the AP2EM was 36.7 μg/m³ in Jiangsu, China, during 2014–2017. The OE model overestimated exposure by 54.0%, and the AE model underestimated exposure by 6.5%. These misestimate reflect ignorance of traditional studies on effects posed from time spent indoors (~85%) and doing low respiratory rate activities (~93%), problems of biased sampling, and neglecting low probability events. The proposed AP2EM treats activity patterns of individuals as chains and uses stochastic estimates to model activity choices, providing a more comprehensive understanding of human activity and exposure characteristics. Overall, the AP2EM is applicable for other air pollutants in different regions and benefits China's air pollution control policy designs.
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