Modelling Smell Events in Urban Pittsburgh with Machine and Deep Learning Techniques

Andreas Gavros, Yen-Chia Hsu, Kostas Karatzas

By deploying machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms, we address the problem of smell event modelling in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. We use the Smell Pittsburgh dataset to develop a model that can reflect the relation between bad smell events and industrial pollutants in a specific urban territory. The initial dataset resulted from crowd-sourcing citizen reports using a mobile phone application, which we categorised in a binary matter (existence or absence of smell events). We investigate the mapping of smell data with air pollution levels that were recorded by a reference station located in the southeastern area of the city. The initial dataset is processed and evaluated to produce an updated dataset, which is used as an input to assess various ML and DL models for modelling smell events. The models utilise a set of air quality and climate data to associate them with a smell event to investigate to what extent these data correlate with unpleasant odours in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The model results are satisfactory, reaching an accuracy of 69.6, with ML models mostly outperforming DL models. This work also demonstrates the feasibility of combining environmental modelling with crowd-sourced information, which may be adopted in other cities when relevant data are available.