Background. The environment has been significantly impacted by rapid urbaniza- tion, leading to a need for changes in climate change and pollution indicators. The 4IR offers a potential solution to efficiently manage these impacts. Smart city ecosys- tems can provide well-designed, sustainable, and safe cities that enable holistic climate change and global warming solutions through various community-centred initiatives. These include smart planning techniques, smart environment monitoring, and smart governance. An air quality intelligence platform, which operates as a complete mea- surement site for monitoring and governing air quality, has shown promising results in providing actionable insights. This article aims to highlight the potential of ma- chine learning models in predicting air quality, providing data-driven strategic and sustainable solutions for smart cities. Methods. This study proposed an end-to-end air quality predictive model for smart city applications, utilizing four machine learning techniques and two deep learning techniques. These include Ada Boost, SVR, RF, KNN, MLP regressor and LSTM. The study was conducted in four different urban cities in Selangor, Malaysia, including Petaling Jaya, Banting, Klang, and Shah Alam. The model considered the air qual- ity data of various pollution markers such as PM2.5, PM10, O3, and CO. Additionally, meteorological data including wind speed and wind direction were also considered, and their interactions with the pollutant markers were quantified. The study aimed to determine the correlation variance of the dependent variable in predicting air pol- lution and proposed a feature optimization process to reduce dimensionality and re- move irrelevant features to enhance the prediction of PM2.5, improving the existing LSTM model. The study estimates the concentration of pollutants in the air based on training and highlights the contribution of feature optimization in air quality predic- tions through feature dimension reductions. Results. In this section, the results of predicting the concentration of pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, O3, and CO) in the air are presented in R2 and RMSE. In predicting the PM10 and PM2.5 concentration, LSTM performed the best overall high R2 values in the four study areas with the R2 values of 0.998, 0.995, 0.918, and 0.993 in Banting, How to cite this article Neo EX, Hasikin K, Lai KW, Mokhtar MI, Azizan MM, Hizaddin HF, Razak SA, Yanto . 2023. Artificial intelligence-assisted air quality monitoring for smart city management. PeerJ Comput. Sci. 9:e1306 http://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1306 Petaling, Klang and Shah Alam stations, respectively. The study indicated that among the studied pollution markers, PM2.5, PM10, NO2, wind speed and humidity are the most important elements to monitor. By reducing the number of features used in the model the proposed feature optimization process can make the model more interpretable and provide insights into the most critical factor affecting air quality. Findings from this study can aid policymakers in understanding the underlying causes of air pollution and develop more effective smart strategies for reducing pollution levels.

The remediation of heavy metal contaminated mangrove soil with proper washing agents is critical for reducing the harmfulness of heavy metal contaminated soil to the environment. This work is aimed to investigate the potential of natural-based deep eutectic solvents as soil washing agents. Choline chloride (ChCl) and two organic acids, lactic acid and levulinic acid, are used as degradable and natural washing agents to remove Pb in the soil. Results verified that ChCl: Lactic Acid (1:2) [ChCl-LacA] and ChCl: Levulinic Acid (1:2) [ChCl-LevA] were found to be suitable for the removal of Pb from the contaminated soils, which significantly lowers the total Pb concentration in the soil. The high distribution ratio from the Conductor-like Screening Model for Real Solvents (COSMO-RS) screening gave an early indication that natural acid DESs are effective soil washing agents. The effect of washing agent concentration, soil to liquid ratio, contact time, and the interaction between acid DESs and metal ions was evaluated. ChCl-LacA and ChCl-LevA remove lead to 97% and 99%, respectively, under optimum conditions. ICP-MS, XRD, and FTIR spectroscopy analysis clarified the interaction between DES and metal ions. As a washing agent, green and natural DESs provide an environmentally sustainable alternative. Employing soil washing to remove heavy metals is a simple, rapid, and cheap remediation technology that could potentially be used in mitigating soil pollution.

A common difficulty in building prediction models with realworld environmental datasets is the skewed distribution of classes. There are significantly more samples for day-to-day classes, while rare events such as polluted classes are uncommon. Consequently, the limited availability of minority outcomes lowers the classifier’s overall reliability. This study assesses the capability of machine learning (ML) algorithms in tackling imbalanced water quality data based on the metrics of precision, recall, and F1 score. It intends to balance the misled accuracy towards the majority of data. Hence, 10 ML algorithms of its performance are compared. The classifiers included are AdaBoost, Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis, k-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayes, Decision Trees, Random Forest, Extra Trees, Bagging, and the Multilayer Perceptron. This study also uses the Easy Ensemble Classifier, Balanced Bagging, and RUSBoost algorithm to evaluate multi-class imbalanced learning methods. The comparison results revealed that a highaccuracy machine learning model is not always good in recall and sensitivity. This paper’s stacked ensemble deep learning (SE-DL) generalization model effectively classifies the water quality index (WQI) based on 23 input variables. The proposed algorithm achieved a remarkable average of 95.69%, 94.96%, 92.92%, and 93.88% for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, respectively. In addition, the proposed model is compared against two state-of-the-art classifiers, the XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) and Light Gradient Boosting Machine, where performance metrics of balanced accuracy and g-mean are included. The experimental setup concluded XGBoost with a higher balanced accuracy and G-mean. However, the SE-DL model has a better and more balanced performance in the F1 score. The SE-DL model aligns with the goal of this study to ensure the balance between accuracy and completeness for each water quality class. The proposed algorithm is also capable of higher efficiency at a lower computational time against using the standard Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) approach to imbalanced datasets.

Environmental issues such as environmental pollutions and climate change are the impacts of globalization and become debatable issues among academics and industry key players. One of the environmental issues which is air pollution has been catching attention among industrialists, researchers, and communities around the world. However, it has always neglected until the impacts on human health become worse, and at times, irreversible. Human exposure to air pollutant such as particulate matters, sulfur dioxide, ozone and carbon monoxide contributed to adverse health hazards which result in respiratory diseases, cardiorespiratory diseases, cancers, and worst, can lead to death. This has led to a spike increase of hospitalization and emergency department visits especially at areas with worse pollution cases that seriously impacting human life and health. To address this alarming issue, a predictive model of air pollution is crucial in assessing the impacts of health due to air pollution. It is also critical in predicting the air quality index when assessing the risk contributed by air pollutant exposure. Hence, this systemic review explores the existing studies on anticipating air quality impact to human health using the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI). From the extensive review, we highlighted research gaps in this field that are worth to inquire. Our study proposes to develop an AI-based integrated environmental and health impact assessment system using federated learning. This is specifically aims to identify the association of health impact and pollution based on socio-economic activities and predict the Air Quality Index (AQI) for impact assessment. The output of the system will be utilized for hospitals and healthcare services management and planning. The proposed solution is expected to accommodate the needs of the critical and prioritization of sensitive group of publics during pollution seasons. Our finding will bring positive impacts to the society in terms of improved healthcare services quality, environmental and health sustainability. The findings are beneficial to local authorities either in healthcare or environmental monitoring institutions especially in the developing countries.

Water quality analysis is essential to understand the ecological status of aquatic life. Conventional water quality index (WQI) assessment methods are limited to features such as water acidic or basicity (pH), dissolved oxygen (DO), biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3-N), and suspended solids (SS). These features are often insufficient to represent the water quality of a heavy metal–polluted river. Therefore, this paper aims to explore and analyze novel input features in order to formulate an improved WQI. In this work, prospective insights on the feasibility of alternative water quality input variables as new discriminant features are discussed. The new discriminant features are a step toward formulating adaptive water quality parameters according to the land use activities surrounding the river. The results and analysis obtained from this study have proven the possibility of predicting WQI using new input features. This work analyzes 17 new input features, namely conductivity (COND), salinity (SAL), turbidity (TUR), dissolved solids (DS), nitrate (NO3), chloride (Cl), phosphate (PO4), arsenic (As), chromium (Cr), zinc (Zn), calcium (Ca), iron (Fe), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), sodium (Na), E. coli, and total coliform, in predicting WQI using machine learning techniques. Five regression algorithms—random forest (RF), AdaBoost, support vector regression (SVR), decision tree regression (DTR), and multilayer perception (MLP)—are applied for preliminary model selection. The results show that the RF algorithm exhibits better prediction performance, with R2 of 0.974. Then, this work proposes a modified RF by incorporating the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) into the conventional RF method. The proposed modified RF method is shown to achieve 77.68%, 74%, 69%, and 71% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively. In addition, the sensitivity analysis is included to highlight the importance of the turbidity variable in WQI prediction. The results of sensitivity analysis highlight the importance of certain water quality variables that are not present in the conventional WQI formulation.

The feasibility of artificial intelligence (AI) as a predictive model for thorough efficacy analysis on environmental pollution applied on mangrove forests are discussed. Mangrove forests are among the most productive and biological diverse ecosystems on the planet. However, due to environmental pollution and climate change, mangrove forests are in serious decline. Despite crucial issues pertaining mangrove forests, the law enforcement on the ecosystem is still dubious due to the lack of evidence and data that could provide accurate analysis and prediction. The main highlight of this review elaborates on pollutant markers in soil, water, and air, by correlating these three aspects to the sustainability of mangrove ecosystem. The research gap identified from this review suggests the application of an integrated environmental prediction system for practical environmental insights. A predictive model for environmental decision-making could be developed by integrating meteorological, climatological, hydrological, atmospheric, and heavy metal concentration to understand the interaction between each factor for an efficient solution of pollutant reduction scheme involving mangrove ecosystems.