Dalarna University's logo and link to the university's website

du.sePublications
Planned maintenance
A system upgrade is planned for 10/12-2024, at 12:00-13:00. During this time DiVA will be unavailable.
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
The Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on the Urban Air Quality: A Machine Learning Approach.
Dalarna University, School of Information and Engineering.
2021 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

‘‘SARS-CoV-2’’ which is responsible for the current pandemic of COVID-19 disease was first reported from Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019. Since then, to prevent its propagation around the world, a set of rapid and strict countermeasures have been taken. While most of the researchers around the world initiated their studies on the Covid-19 lockdown effect on air quality and concluded pollution reduction, the most reliable methods that can be used to find out the reduction of the pollutants in the air are still in debate. In this study, we performed an analysis on how Covid-19 lockdown procedures impacted the air quality in selected cities i.e. New Delhi, Diepkloof, Wuhan, and London around the world. The results show that the air quality index (AQI) improved by 43% in New Delhi,18% in Wuhan,15% in Diepkloof, and 12% in London during the initial lockdown from the 19th of March 2020 to 31st May 2020 compared to that of four-year pre-lockdown. Furthermore, the concentrations of four main pollutants, i.e., NO2, CO, SO2, and PM2.5 were analyzed before and during the lockdown in India. The quantification of pollution drop is supported by statistical measurements like the AVOVA Test and the Permutation Test. Overall, 58%, 61%,18% and 55% decrease is observed in NO2, CO,SO2, and PM2.5 concentrations, respectively. To check if the change in weather has played any role in pollution level reduction or not we analyzed how weather factors are correlated with pollutants using a correlation matrix. Finally, machine learning regression models are constructed to assess the lockdown impact on air quality in India by incorporating weather data. Gradient Boosting is performed well in the Prediction of drop-in PM2.5 concentration on individual cities in India. By comparing the feature importance ranking by regression models supported by correlation factors with PM2.5.This study concludes that COVID-19 lockdown has a significant effect on the natural environment and air quality improvement.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021.
Keywords [en]
Covid-19, air pollutants, Lockdown, AVOVA, Permutation Test, Machine Learning, feature importance.
National Category
Other Social Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:du-37493OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-37493DiVA, id: diva2:1571835
Subject / course
Microdata Analysis
Available from: 2021-06-23 Created: 2021-06-23 Last updated: 2021-06-24

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(2063 kB)929 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 2063 kBChecksum SHA-512
156d6871b41081199144952ff1d0ec856b3f06950deb96d0bb858570b803359d920852692b5a013902b9edc9ff09482184e48df45986d10f72aa36b578599ecf
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

By organisation
School of Information and Engineering
Other Social Sciences

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 929 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 652 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf