Yuanyuan Xiao, Tingting Liu, and Mengmeng Li
Shandong Huayu University of Technology, Dezhou, Shandong, 253000, China
Received: August 3, 2025
Accepted: August 20, 2026
Publication Date: October 09, 2026
Test-set comparison of predictive accuracy and uncertainty performance across the six UQ-enabled models
Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.
Download Citation: BibTeX | http://dx.doi.org/10.6180/jase.202701_36.010
The concentration of Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5) and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has a great influence on human health and cognitive performance. Making PM2.5 predictions with meaningful Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is essential to proactive IAQ management. This paper is an in-depth assessment of deep learning (LSTMAttn-UQ, GRUAttn-UQ, WNN-UQ) and machine learning (CatBoost-UQ, LightGBM-UQ, HGBoost-UQ) to predict indoor PM2.5 concentrations and related uncertainties, based on a publicly available time-series dataset. The measurement of performance was conducted through standard regression measurements and UQ measurements, including Prediction Interval Coverage Probability (PICP) and Mean Prediction Interval Width (MPIW), with a target PICP of 0.90. Test set: It was found that LSTMAttn-UQ and GRUAttn-UQ showed better UQ calibration (PICP 0.895-0.899), which means that uncertainty estimates are good. On the other hand, WNN-UQ exhibited the highest point-prediction accuracy (e.g., the lowest Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 2.7495) and computation efficiency, but with a relatively lower PICP (0.8285). The other ensemble models demonstrated bad generalization of UQ. These results indicate a critical trade-off, which is understandable when modeling selection is concerned with a preference in the achievement of either UQ reliability or point prediction accuracy and efficiency for IAQ applications.
Keywords: IAQ, UQ, Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), PM2.5 forecasting
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