Evolving the neural network model for forecasting air pollution time series

The modelling of real-world processes such as air quality is generally a difficult task due to both their chaotic and non-linear phenomenon and high dimensional sample space. Despite neural networks (NN) have been used successfully in this domain, the selection of network architecture is still problematic and time consuming task when developing a model for practical situation. This paper presents a study where a parallel genetic algorithm (GA) is used for selecting the inputs and designing the high-level architecture of a multi-layer perceptron model for forecasting hourly concentrations of nitrogen dioxide at a busy urban traffic station in Helsinki. In addition, the tuning of GA's parameters for the problem is considered in experimental way. The results showed that the GA is a capable tool for tackling the practical problems of neural network design. However, it was observed that the evaluation of NN models is a computationally expensive process, which set limits for the search techniques. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.