A novel approach for detecting alerts in urban pollution monitoring with low cost sensors

The problem of estimating the pollutants in urban areas is one of the most active research in recent years due to the increasing concerns about their influence on human health. Solide state sensors, increasingly small and inexpensive, are being used to build compact multisensor devices. Suffering from sensors instabilities and cross-sensitivities, they need ad-hoc calibration procedures in order to reach satisfying performance levels. In this paper we propose a novel approach based on Nonlinear AutoRegressive eXogenous model (NARX) to estimate pollutants in urban area and detecting alerts with respect to law limits. We compared our proposal with two other techniques, based on a Feed Forward Neural Network and a Semi Supervised Learning approach, respectively. Numerical simulations have been carried out to validate the proposed approach on a real dataset.