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. 2023 Jul 1:228:115835.
doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2023.115835. Epub 2023 Apr 4.

Machine learning model to predict vehicle electrification impacts on urban air quality and related human health effects

V Calatayud  1 , J J Diéguez  2 , E Agathokleous  3 , P Sicard  4
Affiliations

Machine learning model to predict vehicle electrification impacts on urban air quality and related human health effects

V Calatayud et al. Environ Res. .

Abstract

Air pollution is a prevailing environmental problem in cities worldwide. The future vehicle electrification (VE), which in Europe will be importantly fostered by the ban of thermal engines from 2035, is expected to have an important effect on urban air quality. Machine learning models represent an optimal tool for predicting changes in air pollutants concentrations in the context of future VE. For the city of Valencia (Spain), a XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting package) model was used in combination with SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis, both to investigate the importance of different factors explaining air pollution concentrations and predicting the effect of different levels of VE. The model was trained with 5 years of data including the COVID-19 lockdown period in 2020, in which mobility was strongly reduced resulting in unprecedent changes in air pollution concentrations. The interannual meteorological variability of 10 years was also considered in the analyses. For a 70% VE, the model predicted: 1) improvements in nitrogen dioxide pollution (-34% to -55% change in annual mean concentrations, for the different air quality stations), 2) a very limited effect on particulate matter concentrations (-1 to -4% change in annual means of PM2.5 and PM10), 3) heterogeneous responses in ground-level ozone concentrations (-2% to +12% change in the annual means of the daily maximum 8-h average concentrations). Even at a high VE increase of 70%, the 2021 World Health Organization Air Quality Guidelines will be exceeded for all pollutants in some stations. VE has a potentially important impact in terms of reducing NO2-associated premature mortality, but complementary strategies for reducing traffic and controlling all different air pollution sources should also be implemented to protect human health.

Keywords: Air pollution; Cities; Electric car; Health impact assessment; SHAP; XGBoost.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.