Multimodal Imputation-Based Multimodal Autoencoder Framework for AQI Classification and Prediction of Indian Cities

Rising urbanization necessitates robust air quality monitoring and prediction systems, particularly in developing nations like India, to mitigate adverse health impacts. Previous research primarily focused on machine learning algorithms for Air Quality Index (AQI) prediction and classification. We propose a novel MI-MMA-XGB which coupled features of multimodal imputer(MI) with the features of multi-modal autoencoder (MMA) and fed to an XGBoost(XGB) algorithm for AQI prediction and classification. Moreover, imputation approaches namely, KNN, MICE, and SVD were employed to address problems with null values and outliers. Furthermore, SMOTE is employed to balance the imputed data and then the model was trained on both balanced and unbalanced imputed data to extract predictive features. In this process, our model MI-MMA-XGB achieves significant accuracy, reaching 97.14% and 93.87% with and without SMOTE, respectively. Additionally, it attains an R² score of 0.9578 and an RMSE of 0.203 for AQI prediction in Indian cities. The proposed model outperforms baseline models in both classification and regression tasks across various evaluation metrics.